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NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 
WITH   SOME  OTHER  NOTES 


BY  HENRY  JAMES 


A  SMALL  BOY  AND  OTHERS 
NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 
WITH  SOME  OTHER  NOTES 


NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

WITH   SOME  OTHER  NOTES 


BY 

HENRY  JAMES 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,  1914,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  October,  1914 


College 
Library, 


CONTENTS 


PACE 


ROBERT  Louis  STEVENSON      i 

EMILE  ZOLA 26 

GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT 65 

HONORE  DE  BALZAC,  1902 109 

HONORE  DE  BALZAC,  1913       143 

GEORGE  SAND,  1897 160 

GEORGE  SAND,  1899 187 

GEORGE  SAND,  1914 214 

GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO,  1902 245 

MATILDE  SERAO 294 

THE  NEW  NOVEL,  1914 314 

DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER,  1895 362 

THE  NOVEL  IN  "THE  RING  AND  THE  BOOK,"  1912.  385 

AN  AMERICAN  ART-SCHOLAR  :    CHARLES  ELIOT  NOR- 
TON, 1908 412 


vi  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

LONDON  NOTES,  JANUARY  1897 424 

LONDON  NOTES,  JUNE  1897 428 

LONDON  NOTES,  JULY  1897 436 

LONDON  NOTES,  AUGUST  1897 446 


NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 
WITH  SOME  OTHER  NOTES 


NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON 

IT  was  the  happy  fortune  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  to 
have  created  beyond  any  man  of  his  craft  in  our  day  a 
body  of  readers  inspired  with  the  feelings  that  we  for 
the  most  part  place  at  the  service  only  of  those  for 
whom  our  affection  is  personal.  There  was  no  one 
who  knew  the  man,  one  may  safely  assert,  who  was 
not  also  devoted  to  the  writer — conforming  in  this  re- 
spect to  a  general  law  (if  law  it  be)  that  shows  us  many 
exceptions;  but,  naturally  and  not  inconveniently,  it 
had  to  remain  far  from  true  that  all  devotees  of  the 
writer  were  able  to  approach  the  man.  The  case  was 
nevertheless  that  the  man  somehow  approached  them, 
and  that  to  read  him — certainly  to  read  him  with  the 
full  sense  of  his  charm — came  to  mean  for  many  per- 
sons much  the  same  as  to  "meet"  him.  It  was  as  if 
he  wrote  himself  outright  and  altogether,  rose  straight 
to  the  surface  of  his  prose,  and  still  more  of  his  hap- 
piest verse;  so  that  these  things  gave  out,  besides  what- 
ever else,  his  look  and  motions  and  voice,  showed  his 
life  and  manners,  all  that  there  was  of  him,  his  "tre- 
mendous secrets"  not  excepted.  We  grew  in  short  to 
possess  him  entire,  and  the  example  is  the  more  curi- 
ous and  beautiful  as  he  neither  made  a  business  of 
"confession"  nor  cultivated  most  those  forms  through 
which  the  ego  shines.  His  great  successes  were  sup- 


2  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

posititious  histories  of  persons  quite  different  from  him- 
self, and  the  objective,  as  we  have  learned  to  call  it, 
was  the  ideal  to  which  he  oftenest  sacrificed. 

The  effect  of  it  all  none  the  less  was  such  that  his 
Correspondence  has  only  seemed  to  administer  de- 
lightfully a  further  push  to  a  door  already  half  open 
and  through  which  we  enter  with  an  extraordinary 
failure  of  any  sense  of  intrusion.  We  feel  indeed  that 
we  are  living  with  him,  but  what  is  that  but  what  we 
were  doing  before  ?  Through  his  Correspondence  cer- 
tainly the  ego  does,  magnificently,  shine — which  is 
much  the  best  thing  that  in  any  correspondence  it  can 
ever  do.  But  even  the  "Vailima  Letters,"  published 
by  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin  in  1895,  na£^  already  both  es- 
tablished that  and  allayed  our  diffidence.  "It  came 
over  me  the  other  day  suddenly  that  this  diary  of  mine 
to  you  would  make  good  pickings  after  I  am  dead,  and 
a  man  could  make  some  kind  of  book  out  of  it  without 
much  trouble.  So,  for  God's  sake,  don't  lose  them." 

Being  on  these  terms  with  our  author,  and  feeling  as 
if  we  had  always  been,  we  profit  by  freedoms  that  seem 
but  the  consecration  of  intimacy.  Not  only  have  we 
no  sense  of  intrusion,  but  we  are  so  prepared  to  pene- 
trate further  that  when  we  come  to  limits  we  quite 
feel  as  if  the  story  were  mutilated  and  the  copy  not 
complete.  There  it  is  precisely  that  we  seize  the 
secret  of  our  tie.  Of  course  it  was  personal,  for  how 
did  it  operate  in  any  connection  whatever  but  to  make 
us  live  with  him  ?  We  had  lived  with  him  in  "Treasure 
Island,"  in  "Kidnapped"  and  in  "Catriona,"  just  as 
we  do,  by  the  light  of  these  posthumous  volumes,  in 
the  South  Seas  and  at  Vailima;  and  our  present  con- 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  3 

fidence  comes  from  the  fact  of  a  particularly  charming 
continuity.  It  is  not  that  his  novels  were  "subjec- 
tive," but  that  his  life  was  romantic,  and  in  the  very 
same  degree  in  which  his  own  conception,  his  own  pres- 
entation, of  that  element  touches  and  thrills.  If  we 
want  to  know  even  more  it  is  because  we  are  always 
and  everywhere  in  the  story. 

To  this  absorbing  extension  of  the  story  then  the 
two  volumes  of  Letters1  now  published  by  Mr.  Sidney 
Colvin  beautifully  contribute.  The  shelf  of  our  li- 
brary that  contains  our  best  letter-writers  is  consider- 
ably furnished,  but  not  overcrowded,  and  its  glory  is 
not  too  great  to  keep  Stevenson  from  finding  there  a 
place  with  the  very  first.  He  will  not  figure  among 
the  writers — those  apt  in  this  line  to  enjoy  precedence 
— to  whom  only  small  things  happen  and  who  beguile 
us  by  making  the  most  of  them;  he  belongs  to  the  class 
who  have  both  matter  and  manner,  substance  and 
spirit,  whom  life  carries  swiftly  before  it  and  who 
signal  and  communicate,  not  to  say  gesticulate,  as 
they  go.  He  lived  to  the  topmost  pulse,  and  the  last 
thing  that  could  happen  was  that  he  should  find  him- 
self on  any  occasion  with  nothing  to  report.  Of  all 
that  he  may  have  uttered  on  certain  occasions  we  are 
inevitably  not  here  possessed — a  fact  that,  as  I  have 
hinted  above,  affects  us,  perversely,  as  an  inexcusable 
gap  in  the  story;  but  he  never  fails  of  the  thing  that 
we  most  love  letters  for,  the  full  expression  of  the  mo- 
ment and  the  mood,  the  actual  good  or  bad  or  mid- 
dling, the  thing  in  his  head,  his  heart  or  his  house. 

^"The  Letters  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  to  his  Family  and  Friends. 
Selected  and  Edited,  with  Notes  and  Introduction,  by  Sidney  Colvin," 
1899. 


4  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Mr.  Colvin  has  given  us  an  admirable  "Introduction" 
— a  characterisation  of  his  friend  so  founded  at  once  on 
knowledge  and  on  judgment  that  the  whole  sense  of 
the  man  strikes  us  as  extracted  in  it.  He  has  eluci- 
dated each  group  or  period  with  notes  that  leave  noth- 
ing to  be  desired;  and  nothing  remains  that  I  can 
think  of  to  thank  him  for  unless  the  intimation  that  we 
may  yet  look  for  another  volume — which,  however 
much  more  free  it  might  make  us  of  the  author's  mys- 
tery, we  should  accept,  I  repeat,  with  the  same  absence 
of  scruple.  Nothing  more  belongs  to  our  day  than 
this  question  of  the  inviolable,  of  the  rights  of  privacy 
and  the  justice  of  our  claim  to  aid  from  editors  and 
other  retailers  in  getting  behind  certain  eminent  or 
defiant  appearances;  and  the  general  knot  so  presented 
is  indeed  a  hard  one  to  untie.  Yet  we  may  take  it  for 
a  matter  regarding  which  such  publications  as  Mr. 
Colvin's  have  much  to  suggest. 

There  is  no  absolute  privacy — save  of  course  when 
the  exposed  subject  may  have  wished  or  endeavoured 
positively  to  constitute  it;  and  things  too  sacred  are 
often  only  things  that  are  not  perhaps  at  all  otherwise 
superlative.  One  may  hold  both  that  people — that 
artists  perhaps  in  particular — are  well  advised  to  cover 
their  tracks,  and  yet  that  our  having  gone  behind,  or 
merely  stayed  before,  in  a  particular  case,  may  be  a 
minor  question  compared  with  our  having  picked  up  a 
value.  Personal  records  of  the  type  before  us  can  at 
any  rate  obviously  be  but  the  reverse  of  a  deterrent  to 
the  urged  inquirer.  They  are  too  happy  an  instance— 
they  positively  make  for  the  risked  indiscretion. 
Stevenson  never  covered  his  tracks,  and  the  tracks 
prove  perhaps  to  be  what  most  attaches  us.  We  fol- 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  5 

low  them  here,  from  year  to  year  and  from  stage  to 
stage,  with  the  same  charmed  sense  with  which  he  has 
made  us  follow  some  hunted  hero  in  the  heather. 
Life  and  fate  and  an  early  catastrophe  were  ever  at  his 
heels,  and  when  he  at  last  falls  fighting,  sinks  down  in 
the  very  act  of  valour,  the  "happy  ending,"  as  he  calls 
it  for  some  of  his  correspondents,  is,  though  precipi- 
tated and  not  conventional,  essentially  given  us. 

His  descent  and  his  origin  all  contribute  to  the  pic- 
ture, which  it  seems  to  me  could  scarce — since  we  speak 
of  "endings" — have  had  a  better  beginning  had  he 
himself  prearranged  it.  Without  prearrangements  in- 
deed it  was  such  a  cluster  of  terms  as  could  never  be 
wasted  on  him,  one  of  those  innumerable  matters  of 
"effect,"  Scotch  and  other,  that  helped  to  fill  his 
romantic  consciousness.  Edinburgh,  in  the  first  place, 
the  "romantic  town,"  was  as  much  his  "own"  as  it 
ever  was  the  great  precursor's  whom,  in  "Weir  of 
Hermiston"  as  well  as  elsewhere,  he  presses  so  hard; 
and  this  even  in  spite  of  continual  absence — in  virtue 
of  a  constant  imaginative  reference  and  an  intense  in- 
tellectual possession.  The  immediate  background 
formed  by  the  profession  of  his  family — the  charge  of 
the  public  lights  on  northern  coasts — was  a  setting  that 
he  could  not  have  seen  his  way  to  better;  while  no  less 
happy  a  condition  was  met  by  his  being  all  lonely  in 
his  father's  house — the  more  that  the  father,  admirably 
commemorated  by  the  son  and  after  his  fashion  as 
strongly  marked,  was  antique  and  strenuous,  and  that 
the  son,  a  genius  to  be  and  of  frail  constitution,  was  (in 
the  words  of  the  charming  anecdote  of  an  Edinburgh 
lady  retailed  in  one  of  these  volumes),  if  not  exactly 
what  could  be  called  bonny,  "pale,  penetrating  and  in- 


6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

teresting."  The  poet  in  him  had  from  the  first  to  be 
pacified — temporarily,  that  is,  and  from  hand  to  mouth, 
as  is  the  manner  for  poets;  so  that  with  friction  and 
tension  playing  their  part,  with  the  filial  relation  quite 
classically  troubled,  with  breaks  of  tradition  and  lapses 
from  faith,  with  restless  excursions  and  sombre  returns, 
with  the  love  of  life  at  large  mixed  in  his  heart  with 
every  sort  of  local  piety  and  passion  and  the  unjusti- 
fied artist  fermenting  on  top  of  all  in  the  recusant 
engineer,  he  was  as  well  started  as  possible  toward  the 
character  he  was  to  keep. 

All  this  obviously,  however,  was  the  sort  of  thing 
that  the  story  the  most  generally  approved  would  have 
had  at  heart  to  represent  as  the  mere  wild  oats  of  a 
slightly  uncanny  cleverness — as  the  life  handsomely 
reconciled  in  time  to  the  common  course  and  crowned, 
after  a  fling  or  two  of  amusement,  with  young  wedded 
love  and  civic  responsibility.  The  actual  story,  alas, 
was  to  transcend  the  conventional  one,  for  it  happened 
to  be  a  case  of  a  hero  of  too  long  a  wind  and  too  well 
turned  out  for  his  part.  Everything  was  right  for  the 
discipline  of  Alan  Fairford  but  that  the  youth  was 
after  all  a  phoenix.  As  soon  as  it  became  a  case  of 
justifying  himself  for  straying — as  in  the  enchanting 
"Inland  Voyage"  and  the  "Travels  with  a  Donkey" 
—how  was  he  to  escape  doing  so  with  supreme  felicity  ? 
The  fascination  in  him  from  the  first  is  the  mixture, 
and  the  extraordinary  charm  of  his  letters  is  that  they 
are  always  showing  this.  It  is  the  proportions  more- 
over that  are  so  admirable — the  quantity  of  each  dif- 
ferent thing  that  he  fitted  to  each  other  one  and  to 
the  whole.  The  free  life  would  have  been  all  his 
dream  if  so  large  a  part  of  it  had  not  been  that  love  of 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  7 

letters,  of  expression  and  form,  which  is  but  another 
name  for  the  life  of  service.  Almost  the  last  word 
about  him,  by  the  same  law,  would  be  that  he  had  at 
any  rate  consummately  written,  were  it  not  that  he 
seems  still  better  characterised  by  his  having  at  any 
rate  supremely  lived. 

Perpetually  and  exquisitely  amusing  as  he  was,  his 
ambiguities  and  compatibilities  yielded,  for  all  the  wear 
and  tear  of  them,  endless  "fun"  even  to  himself;  and 
no  one  knew  so  well  with  what  linked  diversities  he 
was  saddled  or,  to  put  it  the  other  way,  how  many 
horses  he  had  to  drive  at  once.  It  took  his  own  de- 
lightful talk  to  show  how  more  than  absurd  it  might 
be,  and,  if  convenient,  how  very  obscurely  so,  that  such 
an  incurable  rover  should  have  been  complicated  both 
with  such  an  incurable  scribbler  and  such  an  incurable 
invalid,  and  that  a  man  should  find  himself  such  an 
anomaly  as  a  drenched  yatchsman  haunted  with 
"style,"  a  shameless  Bohemian  haunted  with  duty, 
and  a  victim  at  once  of  the  personal  hunger  and  in- 
stinct for  adventure  and  of  the  critical,  constructive, 
sedentary  view  of  it.  He  had  everything  all  round- 
adventure  most  of  all;  to  feel  which  we  have  only  to 
turn  from  the  beautiful  flush  of  it  in  his  text  to  the  scarce 
less  beautiful  vision  of  the  great  hilltop  in  Pacific  seas 
to  which  he  was  borne  after  death  by  islanders  and 
chiefs.  Fate,  as  if  to  distinguish  him  as  handsomely  as 
possible,  seemed  to  be  ever  treating  him  to  some  chance 
for  an  act  or  a  course  that  had  almost  nothing  in  its 
favour  but  its  inordinate  difficulty.  If  the  difficulty 
was  in  these  cases  not  all  the  beauty  for  him  it  at  least 
never  prevented  his  finding  in  it — or  our  finding,  at 
any  rate,  as  observers — so  much  beauty  as  comes  from 


8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

a  great  risk  accepted  either  for  an  idea  or  for  simple 
joy.  The  joy  of  risks,  the  more  personal  the  better, 
was  never  far  from  him,  any  more  than  the  excitement 
of  ideas.  The  most  important  step  in  his  life  was  a 
signal  instance  of  this,  as  we  may  discern  in  the  light 
of  "The  Amateur  Emigrant"  and  "Across  the  Plains," 
the  report  of  the  conditions  in  which  he  fared  from 
England  to  California  to  be  married.  Here  as  always 
the  great  note  is  the  heroic  mixture — the  thing  he  saw, 
morally  as  well  as  imaginatively;  action  and  perform- 
ance at  any  cost,  and  the  cost  made  immense  by  want 
of  health  and  want  of  money,  illness  and  anxiety  of  the 
extremest  kind,  and  by  unsparing  sensibilities  and  per- 
ceptions. He  had  been  launched  in  the  world  for  a 
fighter  with  the  organism  say  of  a  "composer,"  though 
also  it  must  be  added  with  a  beautiful  saving  sanity. 

It  is  doubtless  after  his  settlement  in  Samoa  that  his 
letters  have  most  to  give,  but  there  are  things  they 
throw  off  from  the  first  that  strike  the  note  above  all 
characteristic,  show  his  imagination  always  at  play,  for 
drollery  or  philosophy,  with  his  circumstances.  The 
difficulty  in  writing  of  him  under  the  personal  impres- 
sion is  to  suggest  enough  how  directly  his  being  the 
genius  that  he  was  kept  counting  in  it.  In  1879  he 
writes  from  Monterey  to  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse,  in  refer- 
ence to  certain  grave  symptoms  of  illness:  "I  may  be 
wrong,  but  ...  I  believe  I  must  go.  ...  But  death 
is  no  bad  friend;  a  few  aches  and  gasps,  and  we  are 
done;  like  the  truant  child,  I  am  beginning  to  grow 
weary  and  timid  in  this  big,  jostling  city,  and  could  run 
to  my  nurse,  even  although  she  should  have  to  whip  me 
before  putting  me  to  bed."  This  charming  renuncia- 
tion expresses  itself  at  the  very  time  his  talent  was 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  9 

growing  finer;  he  was  so  fond  of  the  sense  of  youth  and 
the  idea  of  play  that  he  saw  whatever  happened  to  him 
in  images  and  figures,  in  the  terms  almost  of  the  sports 
of  childhood.  "Are  you  coming  over  again  to  see  me 
some  day  soon  ?  I  keep  returning,  and  now  hand  over 
fist,  from  the  realms  of  Hades.  I  saw  that  gentleman 
between  the  eyes,  and  fear  him  less  after  each  visit. 
Only  Charon  and  his  rough  boatmanship  I  somewhat 
fear." 

The  fear  remained  with  him,  sometimes  greater, 
sometimes  less,  during  the  first  years  after  his  mar- 
riage, those  spent  abroad  and  in  England  in  health  re- 
sorts, and  it  marks  constantly,  as  one  may  say,  one 
end  of  the  range  of  his  humour — the  humour  always 
busy  at  the  other  end  with  the  impatience  of  timidities 
and  precautions  and  the  vision  and  invention  of  es- 
sentially open-air  situations.  It  was  the  possibility  of 
the  open-air  situation  that  at  last  appealed  to  him  as 
the  cast  worth  staking  all  for — on  which,  as  usual  in 
his  admirable  rashnesses,  he  was  extraordinarily  justi- 
fied. "No  man  but  myself  knew  all  my  bitterness  in 
those  days.  Remember  that,  the  next  time  you  think 
I  regret  my  exile.  .  .  .  Remember  the  pallid  brute 
that  lived  in  Skerryvore  like  a  weevil  in  a  biscuit." 

He  found  after  an  extraordinarily  adventurous  quest 
the  treasure  island,  the  climatic  paradise  that  met,  that 
enhanced  his  possibilities;  and  with  this  discovery  was 
ushered  in  his  completely  full  and  rich  period,  the  time 
in  which — as  the  wondrous  whimsicality  and  spon- 
taneity of  his  correspondence  testify — his  genius  and 
his  character  most  overflowed.  He  had  done  as  well 
for  himself  in  his  appropriation  of  Samoa  as  if  he  had 


io  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

done  it  for  the  hero  of  a  novel,  only  with  the  complica- 
tions and  braveries  actual  and  palpable.  "I  have  no 
more  hope  in  anything" — and  this  in  the  midst  of  mag- 
nificent production — "than  a  dead  frog;  I  go  into 
everything  with  a  composed  despair,  and  don't  mind — 
just  as  I  always  go  to  sea  with  the  conviction  I  am  to  be 
drowned,  and  like  it  before  all  other  pleasures."  He 
could  go  to  sea  as  often  as  he  liked  and  not  be  spared 
such  hours  as  one  of  these  pages  vividly  evokes — those 
of  the  joy  of  fictive  composition  in  an  otherwise  pros- 
trating storm,  amid  the  crash  of  the  elements  and  with 
his  grasp  of  his  subject  but  too  needfully  sacrificed,  it 
might  have  appeared,  to  his  clutch  of  seat  and  ink- 
stand. "If  only  I  could  secure  a  violent  death,  what  a 
fine  success  !  I  wish  to  die  in  my  boots;  no  more  Land 
of  Counterpane  for  me.  To  be  drowned,  to  be  shot, 
to  be  thrown  from  a  horse — aye,  to  be  hanged  rather 
than  pass  again  through  that  slow  dissolution." 

He  speaks  in  one  of  the  "Vailima  Letters,"  Mr.  Col- 
vin's  publication  of  1895,  to  which  it  is  an  office  of 
these  volumes  promptly  to  make  us  return,  of  one  of 
his  fictions  as  a  "long  tough  yarn  with  some  pictures 
of  the  manners  of  to-day  in  the  greater  world— not  the 
shoddy  sham  world  of  cities,  clubs  and  colleges,  but 
the  world  where  men  still  live  a  man's  life."  That  is 
distinct,  and  in  the  same  letter  he  throws  off"  a  sum- 
mary of  all  that  in  his  final  phase  satisfied  and  bribed 
him  which  is  as  significant  as  it  is  racy.  His  corre- 
spondent, as  was  inevitable  now  and  then  for  his  friends 
at  home,  appears  to  have  indulged  in  one  of  those 
harmless  pointings  of  the  moral — as  to  the  distant 
dangers  he  would  court — by  which  we  all  were  more  or 
less  moved  to  relieve  ourselves  of  the  depressed  con- 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  11 

sciousness  that  he  could  do  beautifully  without  us  and 
that  our  collective  tameness  was  far  (which  indeed  was 
distinctly  the  case)  from  forming  his  proper  element. 
There  is  no  romantic  life  for  which  something  amiable 
has  not  to  be  sweepingly  sacrificed,  and  of  us  in  our 
inevitable  category  the  sweep  practically  was  clean. 

Your  letter  had  the  most  wonderful  "I  told  you  so"  I  ever  heard 
in  the  course  of  my  life.  Why,  you  madman,  I  wouldn't  change 
my  present  installation  for  any  post,  dignity,  honour,  or  advantage 
conceivable  to  me.  It  fills  the  bill;  I  have  the  loveliest  time. 
And  as  for  wars  and  rumours  of  wars,  you  surely  know  enough  of 
me  to  be  aware  that  I  like  that  also  a  thousand  times  better  than 
decrepit  peace  in  Middlesex.  I  do  not  quite  like  politics.  I  am  too 
aristocratic,  I  fear,  for  that.  God  knows  I  don't  care  who  I  chum 
with;  perhaps  like  sailors  best;  but  to  go  round  and  sue  and  sneak 
to  keep  a  crowd  together — never. 

His  categories  satisfied  him;  he  had  got  hold  of  "the 
world  where  men  still  live  a  man's  life" — which  was 
not,  as  we  have  just  seen,  that  of  "cities,  clubs  and 
colleges."  He  was  supremely  suited  in  short  at  last— 
at  the  cost,  it  was  to  be  said,  of  simplifications  of  view 
that,  intellectually,  he  failed  quite  exactly  (it  was  one 
of  his  few  limitations)  to  measure;  but  in  a  way  that 
ministered  to  his  rare  capacity  for  growth  and  placed 
in  supreme  relief  his  affinity  with  the  universal  romantic. 
It  was  not  that  anything  could  ever  be  for  him  plain 
sailing,  but  that  he  had  been  able  at  forty  to  turn  his 
life  into  the  fairytale  of  achieving,  in  a  climate  that  he 
somewhere  describes  as  "an  expurgated  heaven,"  such 
a  happy  physical  consciousness  as  he  had  never  known. 
This  enlarged  in  every  way  his  career,  opening  the 
door  still  wider  to  that  real  puss-in-the-corner  game  of 
opposites  by  which  we  have  critically  the  interest  of 
seeing  him  perpetually  agitated.  Let  me  repeat  that 


12  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

these  new  volumes,  from  the  date  of  his  definite  ex- 
patriation, direct  us  for  the  details  of  the  picture  con- 
stantly to  the  "Vailima  Letters;"  with  as  constant  an 
effect  of  our  thanking  our  fortune — to  say  nothing  of 
his  own — that  he  should  have  had  in  these  years  a 
correspondent  and  a  confidant  who  so  beautifully  drew 
him  out.  If  he  possessed  in  Mr.  Sidney  Colvin  his 
literary  charge  d'affaires  at  home,  the  ideal  friend  and 
alter  ego  on  whom  he  could  unlimitedly  rest,  this  is  a 
proof  the  more — with  the  general  rarity  of  such  cases 
— of  what  it  was  in  his  nature  to  make  people  wish  to 
do  for  him.  To  Mr.  Colvin  he  is  more  familiar  than  to 
any  one,  more  whimsical  and  natural  and  frequently 
more  inimitable — of  all  of  which  a  just  notion  can  be 
given  only  by  abundant  citation.  And  yet  citation 
itself  is  embarrassed,  with  nothing  to  guide  it  but  his 
perpetual  spirits,  perpetual  acuteness  and  felicity, 
restlessness  of  fancy  and  of  judgment.  These  things 
make  him  jump  from  pole  to  pole  and  fairly  hum,  at 
times,  among  the  objects  and  subjects  that  filled  his 
air,  like  a  charged  bee  among  flowers. 

He  is  never  more  delightful  than  when  he  is  most 
egotistic,  most  consciously  charmed  with  something  he 
has  done. 

And  the  papers  are  some  of  them  up  to  dick,  and  no  mistake.  I 
agree  with  you,  the  lights  seem  a  little  turned  down. 

When  we  learn  that  the  articles  alluded  to  are  those 
collected  in  "Across  the  Plains"  we  quite  assent  to  this 
impression  made  by  them  after  a  troubled  interval,  and 
envy  the  author  who,  in  a  far  Pacific  isle,  could  see 
"The  Lantern  Bearers,"  "A  Letter  to  a  Young  Gentle- 
man" and  "  Pulvis  et  Umbra"  float  back  to  him  as  a 
guarantee  of  his  faculty  and  between  covers  constitut- 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  13 

ing  the  book  that  is  to  live.  Stevenson's  masculine 
wisdom  moreover,  his  remarkable  final  sanity,  is  al- 
ways— and  it  was  not  what  made  least  in  him  for  happy 
intercourse — close  to  his  comedy  and  next  door  to  his 
slang. 

And  however  low  the  lights  are,  the  stuff  is  true,  and  I  believe 
the  more  effective;  after  all,  what  I  wish  to  fight  is  the  best  fought 
by  a  rather  cheerless  presentation  of  the  truth.  The  world  must 
return  some  day  to  the  word  "duty,"  and  be  done  with  the  word 
"reward."  There  are  no  rewards,  and  plenty  duties.  And  the 
sooner  a  man  sees  that  and  acts  upon  it,  like  a  gentleman  or  a  fine 
old  barbarian,  the  better  for  himself. 

It  would  perhaps  be  difficult  to  quote  a  single  para- 
graph giving  more  than  that  of  the  whole  of  him. 
But  there  is  abundance  of  him  in  this  too: 

How  do  journalists  fetch  up  their  drivel  ?  ...  It  has  taken  me 
two  months  to  write  45,500  words;  and,  be  damned  to  my  wicked 
prowess,  I  am  proud  of  the  exploit !  .  .  .  A  respectable  little  five- 
bob  volume,  to  bloom  unread  in  shop  windows.  After  that  I'll 
have  a  spank  at  fiction.  And  rest  ?  I  shall  rest  in  the  grave,  or 
when  I  come  to  Italy.  If  only  the  public  will  continue  to  support 
me !  I  lost  my  chance  not  dying;  there  seems  blooming  little  fear 
of  it  now.  I  worked  close  on  five  hours  this  morning;  the  day 
before,  close  on  nine;  and  unless  I  finish  myself  off  with  this  letter 
I'll  have  another  hour  and  a  half,  or  aiblins  twa,  before  dinner. 
Poor  man,  how  you  must  envy  me  as  you  hear  of  these  orgies  of 
work,  and  you  scarce  able  for  a  letter.  But  Lord !  Colvin,  how 
lucky  the  situations  are  not  reversed,  for  I  have  no  situation,  nor 
am  fit  for  any.  Life  is  a  steigh  brae.  Here,  have  at  Knappe,  and 
no  more  clavers ! 

If  he  talked  profusely — and  this  is  perfect  talk — if  he 
loved  to  talk  above  all  of  his  work  in  hand,  it  was  be- 
cause, though  perpetually  frail,  he  was  never  inert,  and 
did  a  thing,  if  he  did  it  at  all,  with  passion.  He  was 
not  fit,  he  says,  for  a  situation,  but  a  situation  overtook 


i4  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

him  inexorably  at  Vailima,  and  doubtless  at  last  in- 
deed swallowed  him  up.  His  position,  with  differences, 
comparing  in  some  respects  smaller  things  to  greater, 
and  with  fewer  differences  after  all  than  likenesses, 
his  position  resembles  that  of  Scott  at  Abbotsford, 
just  as,  sound,  sensible  and  strong  on  each  side  in  spite 
of  the  immense  gift  of  dramatic  and  poetic  vision,  the 
earlier  and  the  later  man  had  something  of  a  common 
nature.  Life  became  bigger  for  each  than  the  answer- 
ing effort  could  meet,  and  in  their  death  they  were  not 
divided.  Stevenson's  late  emancipation  was  a  fairy- 
tale only  because  he  himself  was  in  his  manner  a  magi- 
cian. He  liked  to  handle  many  matters  and  to  shrink 
from  none;  nothing  can  exceed  the  impression  we  get 
of  the  things  that  in  these  years  he  dealt  with  from  day 
to  day  and  as  they  came  up,  and  the  things  that,  as 
well,  almost  without  order  or  relief,  he  planned  and 
invented,  took  up  and  talked  of  and  dropped,  took  up 
and  talked  of  and  carried  through.  Had  I  space  to 
treat  myself  to  a  clue  for  selection  from  the  whole 
record  there  is  nothing  I  should  better  like  it  to  be  than 
a  tracking  of  his  "literary  opinions"  and  literary  proj- 
ects, the  scattered  swarm  of  his  views,  sympathies, 
antipathies,  obiter  dicta,  as  an  artist — his  flurries  and 
fancies,  imaginations,  evocations,  quick  infatuations, 
as  a  teller  of  possible  tales.  Here  is  a  whole  little  circle 
of  discussion,  yet  such  a  circle  that  to  engage  one's  self 
at  all  is  to  be  too  much  engulfed. 

His  overflow  on  such  matters  is  meanwhile  amusing 
enough  as  mere  spirits  and  sport — interesting  as  it 
would  yet  be  to  catch  as  we  might,  at  different  moments, 
the  congruity  between  the  manner  of  his  feeling  a  fable 
in  the  germ  and  that  of  his  afterwards  handling  it. 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  15 

There  are  passages  again  and  again  that  light  strikingly 
what  I  should  call  his  general  conscious  method  in 
this  relation,  were  I  not  more  tempted  to  call  it  his 
conscious — for  that  is  what  it  seems  to  come  to — nega- 
tion of  method.  A  whole  delightful  letter — to  Mr. 
Colvin,  February  I,  1892 — is  a  vivid  type.  (This  letter, 
I  may  mention,  is  independently  notable  for  the  drollery 
of  its  allusion  to  a  sense  of  scandal — of  all  things  in  the 
world — excited  in  some  editorial  breast  by  "The  Beach 
of  Falesa;"  which  leads  him  to  the  highly  pertinent 
remark  that  "this  is  a  poison  bad  world  for  the  ro- 
mancer, this  Anglo-Saxon  world;  I  usually  get  out  of  it 
by  not  having  any  women  in  it  at  all."  Then  he  re- 
members he  had  "The  Treasure  of  Franchard"  refused 
as  unfit  for  a  family  magazine  and  feels — as  well  he 
may—  "despair  weigh  upon  his  wrists."  The  despair 
haunts  him  and  comes  out  on  another  occasion.  "Five 
more  chapters  of  David.  .  .  .  All  love  affair;  seems 
pretty  good  to  me.  Will  it  do  for  the  young  person  ? 
I  don't  know:  since  the  Beach,  I  know  nothing  except 
that  men  are  fools  and  hypocrites,  and  I  know  less  of 
them  than  I  was  fond  enough  to  fancy.")  Always  a 
part  of  his  physiognomy  is  the  play,  so  particularly 
salient,  of  his  moral  fluctuations,  the  way  his  spirits 
are  upset  by  his  melancholy  and  his  grand  conclusions 
by  his  rueful  doubts. 

He  communicates  to  his  confidant  with  the  eager- 
ness of  a  boy  confabulating  in  holidays  over  a  Christmas 
charade;  but  I  remember  no  instance  of  his  express- 
ing a  subject,  as  one  may  say,  as  a  subject — hinting 
at  what  novelists  mainly  know,  one  would  imagine, 
as  the  determinant  thing  in  it,  the  idea  out  of  which  it 
springs.  The  form,  the  envelope,  is  there  with  him, 


16  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

headforemost,  as  the  idea;  titles,  names,  that  is,  chap- 
ters, sequences,  orders,  while  we  are  still  asking  our- 
selves how  it  was  that  he  primarily  put  to  his  own  mind 
what  it  was  all  to  be  about.  He  simply  felt  this,  evi- 
dently, and  it  is  always  the  one  dumb  sound,  the  stopped 
pipe  or  only  unexpressed  thing,  in  all  his  contagious 
candour.  He  finds  none  the  less  in  the  letter  to  which 
I  refer  one  of  the  problems  of  the  wonderful  projected 
"Sophia  Scarlet"  "exactly  a  Balzac  one,  and  I  wish  I 
had  his  fist — for  I  have  already  a  better  method — the 
kinetic — whereas  he  continually  allowed  himself  to  be 
led  into  the  static."  There  we  have  him — Stevenson, 
not  Balzac — at  his  most  overflowing,  and  after  all 
radiantly  capable  of  conceiving  at  another  moment  that 
his  "better  method"  would  have  been  none  at  all  for 
Balzac's  vision  of  a  subject,  least  of  all  of  the  subject, 
the  whole  of  life.  Balzac's  method  was  adapted  to 
his  notion  of  presentation — which  we  may  accept,  it 
strikes  me,  under  the  protection  of  what  he  presents. 
Were  it  not,  in  fine,  as  I  may  repeat,  to  embark  in  a 
bigger  boat  than  would  here  turn  round  I  might  note 
further  that  Stevenson  has  elsewhere — was  disposed  in 
general  to  have — too  short  a  way  with  this  master. 
There  is  an  interesting  passage  in  which  he  charges 
him  with  having  never  known  what  to  leave  out,  a 
passage  which  has  its  bearing  on  condition  of  being 
read  with  due  remembrance  of  the  class  of  performance 
to  which  "Le  Colonel  Chabert,"  for  instance,  "Le 
Cure  de  Tours,"  "L'Interdiction,"  "La  Messe  de 
1'Athee"  (to  name  but  a  few  brief  masterpieces  in  a 
long  list)  appertain. 

These,  however,  are  comparatively  small  questions; 
the  impression,  for  the  reader  of  the  later  letters,  is 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  17 

simply  one  of  singular  beauty — of  deepening  talent,  of 
happier  and  richer  expression,  and  in  especial  of  an 
ironic  desperate  gallantry  that  burns  away,  with  a  finer 
and  finer  fire,  in  a  strange  alien  air  and  is  only  the  more 
touching  to  us  from  his  own  resolute  consumption  of 
the  smoke.  He  had  incurred  great  charges,  he  sailed  a 
ship  loaded  to  the  brim,  so  that  the  strain  under  which 
he  lived  and  wrought  was  immense;  but  the  very  grim- 
ness  of  it  all  is  sunny,  slangy,  funny,  familiar;  there  is 
as  little  of  the  florid  in  his  flashes  of  melancholy  as  of 
the  really  grey  under  stress  of  his  wisdom.  This 
wisdom  had  sometimes  on  matters  of  art,  I  think,  its 
lapses,  but  on  matters  of  life  it  was  really  winged  and 
inspired.  He  has  a  soundness  as  to  questions  of  the 
vital  connection,  a  soundness  all  liberal  and  easy  and 
born  of  the  manly  experience,  that  it  is  a  luxury  to 
touch.  There  are  no  compunctions  nor  real  impa- 
tiences, for  he  had  in  a  singular  degree  got  what  he 
wanted,  the  life  absolutely  discockneyfied,  the  situation 
as  romantically  "swagger"  as  if  it  had  been  an  imagi- 
nation made  real;  but  his  practical  anxieties  necessarily 
spin  themselves  finer,  and  it  is  just  this  production  of 
the  thing  imagined  that  has  more  and  more  to  meet 
them.  It  all  hung,  the  situation,  by  that  beautiful 
golden  thread,  the  swinging  of  which  in  the  wind,  as  he 
spins  it  in  alternate  doubt  and  elation,  we  watch  with 
much  of  the  suspense  and  pity  with  which  we  sit  at  the 
serious  drama.  It  is  serious  in  the  extreme;  yet  the 
forcing  of  production,  in  the  case  of  a  faculty  so  beauti- 
ful and  delicate,  affects  us  almost  as  the  straining  of  a 
nerve  or  the  distortion  of  a  feature. 

I  sometimes  sit  and  yearn  for  anything  in  the  nature  of  an  in- 
come that  would  come  in — mine  has  all  got  to  be  gone  and  fished 
for  with  the  immortal  mind  of  man.  What  I  want  is  the  income 


1 8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

that  really  comes  in  of  itself,  while  all  you  have  to  do  is  just 
to  blossom  and  exist  and  sit  on  chairs.  ...  I  should  probably 
amuse  myself  with  works  that  would  make  your  hair  curl,  if  you 
had  any  left. 

To  read  over  some  of  his  happiest  things,  to  renew 
one's  sense  of  the  extraordinarily  fine  temper  of  his 
imagination,  is  to  say  to  one's  self  "What  a  horse  to 
have  to  ride  every  week  to  market !"  We  must  all  go 
to  market,  but  the  most  fortunate  of  us  surely  are  those 
who  may  drive  thither,  and  on  days  not  too  frequent, 
nor  by  a  road  too  rough,  a  ruder  and  homelier  animal. 
He  touches  in  more  than  one  place — and  with  notable 
beauty  and  real  authority  in  that  little  mine  of  felicities 
the  "Letter  to  a  Young  Gentleman" — on  the  con- 
science for  "frugality"  which  should  be  the  artist's 
finest  point  of  honour;  so  that  one  of  his  complications 
here  was  undoubtedly  the  sense  that  on  this  score  his 
position  had  inevitably  become  somewhat  false.  The 
literary  romantic  is  by  no  means  necessarily  expensive, 
but  of  the  many  ways  in  which  the  practical,  the  active, 
has  to  be  paid  for  this  departure  from  frugality  would 
be,  it  is  easy  to  conceive,  not  the  least.  And  we  per- 
ceive his  recognising  this  as  he  recognised  everything — 
if  not  in  time,  then  out  of  it;  accepting  inconsistency, 
as  he  always  did,  with  the  gaiety  of  a  man  of  courage — 
not  being,  that  is,  however  intelligent,  priggish  for 
logic  and  the  grocer's  book  any  more  than  for  any- 
thing else.  Only  everything  made  for  keeping  it  up, 
and  it  was  a  great  deal  to  keep  up;  though  when  he 
throws  off  "The  Ebb-Tide"  and  rises  to  "Catriona," 
and  then  again  to  "Weir  of  Hermiston,"  as  if  he  could 
rise  to  almost  anything,  we  breathe  anew  and  look 
longingly  forward.  The  latest  of  these  letters  contain 
such  admirable  things,  testify  so  to  the  reach  of  his 


ROBERT  LOUIS   STEVENSON  19 

intelligence  and  in  short  vibrate  so  with  genius  and 
charm,  that  we  feel  him  at  moments  not  only  unex- 
hausted but  replenished,  and  capable  perhaps,  for  all 
we  know  to  the  contrary,  of  new  experiments  and 
deeper  notes.  The  intelligence  and  attention  are  so 
fine  that  he  misses  nothing  from  unawareness;  not  a 
gossamer  thread  of  the  "thought  of  the  time"  that, 
wafted  to  him  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe,  may  not 
be  caught  in  a  branch  and  played  with;  he  puts  such  a 
soul  into  nature  and  such  human  meanings,  for  comedy 
and  tragedy,  into  what  surrounds  him,  however  shabby 
or  short,  that  he  really  lives  in  society  by  living  in  his 
own  perceptions  and  generosities  or,  as  we  say  nowa- 
days, his  own  atmosphere.  In  this  atmosphere — which 
seems  to  have  had  the  gift  of  abounding  the  more  it 
was  breathed  by  others — these  pages  somehow  prompt 
us  to  see  almost  every  object  on  his  tropic  isle  bathed 
and  refreshed. 

So  far  at  any  rate  from  growing  thin  for  want  of 
London  he  can  transmit  to  London  or  to  its  neigh- 
bourhood communications  such  as  it  would  scarce 
know  otherwise  where  to  seek.  A  letter  to  his  cousin, 
R.  A.  M.  Stevenson,  of  September  1894,  touches  so  on 
all  things  and,  as  he  would  himself  have  said,  so  adorns 
them,  brimming  over  with  its  happy  extravagance  of 
thought,  that,  far  again  from  our  feeling  Vailima,  in 
the  light  of  it,  to  be  out  of  the  world,  it  strikes  us  that 
the  world  has  moved  for  the  time  to  Vailima.  There 
is  world  enough  everywhere,  he  quite  unconsciously 
shows,  for  the  individual,  the  right  one,  to  be  what  we 
call  a  man  of  it.  He  has,  like  every  one  not  convenienced 
with  the  pleasant  back-door  of  stupidity,  to  make  his 
account  with  seeing  and  facing  more  things,  seeing 


20  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

and  facing  everything,  with  the  unrest  of  new  impres- 
sions and  ideas,  the  loss  of  the  fond  complacencies  of 
youth. 

But  as  I  go  on  in  life,  day  by  day,  I  become  more  of  a  be- 
wildered child;  I  cannot  get  used  to  this  world,  to  procreation,  to 
heredity,  to  sight,  to  hearing;  the  commonest  things  are  a  burthen. 
The  prim  obliterated  polite  face  of  life,  and  the  broad,  bawdy  and 
orgiastic — or  maenadic — foundations,  form  a  spectacle  to  which  no 
habit  reconciles  me;  and  "I  could  wish  my  days  to  be  bound  each 
to  each"  by  the  same  open-mouthed  wonder.  They  are  anyway, 
and  whether  I  wish  it  or  not.  ...  I  remember  very  well  your 
attitude  to  life — this  conventional  surface  of  it.  You  have  none  of 
that  curiosity  for  the  social  stage  directions,  the  trivial  ficelles  of 
the  business;  it  is  simian;  but  that  is  how  the  wild  youth  of  man  is 
captured. 

The  whole  letter  is  enchanting. 

But  no  doubt  there  is  something  great  in  the  half  success  that 
has  attended  the  effort  of  turning  into  an  emotional  region  Bald 
Conduct  without  any  appeal,  or  almost  none,  to  the  figurative, 
mysterious  and  constitutive  facts  of  life.  Not  that  conduct  is 
not  constitutive,  but  dear !  it's  dreary !  On  the  whole,  conduct  is 
better  dealt  with  on  the  cast-iron  "gentleman"  and  duty  formula, 
with  as  little  fervour  and  poetry  as  possible;  stoical  and  short. 

The  last  letter  of  all,  it  will  have  been  abundantly 
noted,  has,  with  one  of  those  characteristically  thrown- 
out  references  to  himself  that  were  always  half  a  whim, 
half  a  truth  and  all  a  picture,  a  remarkable  premoni- 
tion. It  is  addressed  to  Mr.  Edmond  Gosse. 

It  is  all  very  well  to  talk  of  renunciation,  and  of  course  it  has  to 
be  done.  But  for  my  part,  give  me  a  roaring  toothache !  I  do  like 
to  be  deceived  and  to  dream,  but  I  have  very  little  use  for  either 
watching  or  meditation.  I  was  not  born  for  age.  ...  I  am  a 
childless,  rather  bitter,  very  clear-eyed,  blighted  youth.  I  have, 
in  fact,  lost  the  path  that  makes  it  easy  and  natural  for  you  to 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  21 

descend  the  hill.  I  am  going  at  it  straight.  And  where  I  have  to 
go  down  it  is  a  precipice.  .  .  .  You  can  never  write  another  dedica- 
tion that  can  give  the  same  pleasure  to  the  vanished  Tusitala. 

Two  days  later  he  met  his  end  in  the  happiest  form, 
by  the  straight  swift  bolt  of  the  gods.  It  was,  as  all 
his  readers  know,  with  an  admirable  unfinished  thing 
in  hand,  scarce  a  quarter  written — a  composition  as 
to  which  his  hopes  were,  presumably  with  much  justice 
and  as  they  were  by  no  means  always,  of  the  highest. 
Nothing  is  more  interesting  than  the  rich  way  in  which, 
in  "Weir  of  Hermiston"  and  "Catriona,"  the  pre- 
dominant imaginative  Scot  reasserts  himself  after  gaps 
and  lapses,  distractions  and  deflections  superficially 
extreme.  There  are  surely  few  backward  jumps  of 
this  energy  more  joyous  and  a  pieds  joints,  or  of  a  kind 
more  interesting  to  a  critic.  The  imaginative  vision 
is  hungry  and  tender  just  in  proportion  as  the  actual 
is  otherwise  beset;  so  that  we  must  sigh  always  in  vain 
for  the  quality  that  this  purified  flame,  as  we  call  it, 
would  have  been  able  to  give  the  metal.  And  how 
many  things  for  the  critic  the  case  suggests — how  many 
possible  reflections  cluster  about  it  and  seem  to  take 
light  from  it!  It  was  "romance"  indeed,  "Weir  of 
Hermiston,"  we  feel,  as  we  see  it  only  grow  in  assur- 
ance and  ease  when  the  reach  to  it  over  all  the  spaces 
becomes  more  positively  artificial.  The  case  is  liter- 
ary to  intensity,  and,  given  the  nature  of  the  talent, 
only  thereby  the  more  beautiful:  he  embroiders  in 
silk  and  silver — in  defiance  of  climate  and  nature,  of 
every  near  aspect,  and  with  such  another  antique 
needle  as  was  nowhere,  least  of  all  in  those  latitudes,  to 
be  bought — in  the  intervals  of  wondrous  international 
and  insular  politics  and  of  fifty  material  cares  and  com- 
plications. His  special  stock  of  association,  most  per- 


22  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

sonal  style  and  most  unteachable  trick  fly  away  again 
to  him  like  so  many  strayed  birds  to  nest,  each  with 
the  flutter  in  its  beak  of  some  scrap  of  document  or 
legend,  some  fragment  of  picture  or  story,  to  be  re- 
touched, revarnished  and  reframed. 

These  things  he  does  with  a  gusto,  moreover,  for 
which  it  must  be  granted  that  his  literary  treatment  of 
the  islands  and  the  island  life  had  ever  vainly  waited. 
Curious  enough  that  his  years  of  the  tropics  and  his 
fraternity  with  the  natives  never  drew  from  him  any 
such  "rendered"  view  as  might  have  been  looked  for 
in  advance.  For  the  absent  and  vanished  Scotland  he 
has  the  image — within  the  limits  (too  narrow  ones  we 
may  perhaps  judge)  admitted  by  his  particular  po- 
etic; but  the  law  of  these  things  in  him  was,  as  of 
many  others,  amusingly,  conscientiously  perverse.  The 
Pacific,  in  which  he  materially  delighted,  made  him 
"descriptively"  serious  and  even  rather  dry;  with  his 
own  country,  on  the  other  hand,  materially  impos- 
sible, he  was  ready  to  tread  an  endless  measure.  He 
easily  sends  us  back  again  here  to  our  vision  of  his 
mixture.  There  was  only  one  thing  on  earth  that  he 
loved  as  much  as  literature — which  was  the  total  ab- 
sence of  it;  and  to  the  present,  the  immediate,  whatever 
it  was,  he  always  made  the  latter  offering.  Samoa  was 
susceptible  of  no  "style" — none  of  that,  above  all, 
with  which  he  was  most  conscious  of  an  affinity — save 
the  demonstration  of  its  Tightness  for  life;  and  this 
left  the  field  abundantly  clear  for  the  Border,  the  Great 
North  Road  and  the  eighteenth  century.  I  have  been 
reading  over  "Catriona"  and  "Weir"  with  the  purest 
pleasure  with  which  we  can  follow  a  man  of  genius— 
that  of  seeing  him  abound  in  his  own  sense.  In  "Weir" 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  23 

especially,  like  an  improvising  pianist,  he  superabounds 
and  revels,  and  his  own  sense,  by  a  happy  stroke,  ap- 
peared likely  never  more  fully  and  brightly  to  justify 
him;  to  have  become  even  in  some  degree  a  new  sense, 
with  new  chords  and  possibilities.  It  is  the  "old  game," 
but  it  is  the  old  game  that  he  exquisitely  understands. 
The  figure  of  Hermiston  is  creative  work  of  the  high- 
est order,  those  of  the  two  Kirsties,  especially  that  of 
the  elder,  scarce  less  so;  and  we  ache  for  the  loss  of  a 
thing  which  could  give  out  such  touches  as  the  quick 
joy,  at  finding  herself  in  falsehood,  of  the  enamoured 
girl  whose  brooding  elder  brother  has  told  her  that  as 
soon  as  she  has  a  lover  she  will  begin  to  lie  ("  'Will  I 
have  gotten  my  jo  now  ?'  she  thought  with  secret  rap- 
ture"); or  a  passage  so  richly  charged  with  imagination 
as  that  in  which  the  young  lover  recalls  her  as  he  has 
first  seen  and  desired  her,  seated  at  grey  of  evening 
on  an  old  tomb  in  the  moorland  and  unconsciously 
making  him  think,  by  her  scrap  of  song,  both  of  his 
mother,  who  sang  it  and  whom  he  has  lost,  and 

of  their  common  ancestors  now  dead,  of  their  rude  wars  com- 
posed, their  weapons  buried  with  them,  and  of  these  strange  change- 
lings, their  descendants,  who  lingered  a  little  in  their  places  and 
would  soon  be  gone  also,  and  perhaps  sung  of  by  others  at  the  gloam- 
ing hour.  By  one  of  the  unconscious  arts  of  tenderness  the  two 
women  were  enshrined  together  in  his  memory.  Tears,  in  that  hour 
of  sensibility,  came  into  his  eyes  indifferently  at  the  thought  of 
either;  and  the  girl,  from  being  something  merely  bright  and 
shapely,  was  caught  up  into  the  zone  of  things  serious  as  life  and 
death  and  his  dead  mother.  So  that,  in  all  ways  and  on  either  side, 
Fate  played  his  game  artfully  with  this  poor  pair  of  children.  The 
generations  were  prepared,  the  pangs  were  made  ready,  before  the 
curtain  rose  on  the  dark  drama. 

It  is  not  a  tribute  that  Stevenson  would  at  all  have 
appreciated,  but  I  may  not  forbear  noting  how  closely 


24  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

such  a  page  recalls  many  another  in  the  tenderest 
manner  of  Pierre  Loti.  There  would  not,  compared, 
be  a  pin  to  choose  between  them.  How,  we  at  all 
events  ask  ourselves  as  we  consider  "Weir,"  could  he 
have  kept  it  up  ? — while  the  reason  for  which  he  didn't 
reads  itself  back  into  his  text  as  a  kind  of  beautiful 
rash  divination  in  him  that  he  mightn't  have  to. 
Among  prose  fragments  it  stands  quite  alone,  with  the 
particular  grace  and  sanctity  of  mutilation  worn  by 
the  marble  morsels  of  masterwork  in  another  art. 
This  and  the  other  things  of  his  best  he  left;  but  these 
things,  lovely  as,  on  rereading  many  of  them  at  the 
suggestion  of  his  Correspondence,  they  are,  are  not 
the  whole,  nor  more  than  the  half,  of  his  abiding 
charm.  The  finest  papers  in  "Across  the  Plains,"  in 
"Memories  and  Portraits,"  in  "Virginibus  Puerisque," 
stout  of  substance  and  supremely  silver  of  speech, 
have  both  a  nobleness  and  a  nearness  that  place  them, 
for  perfection  and  roundness,  above  his  fictions,  and 
that  also  may  well  remind  a  vulgarised  generation  of 
what,  even  under  its  nose,  English  prose  can  be.  But 
it  is  bound  up  with  his  name,  for  our  wonder  and  re- 
flection, that  he  is  something  other  than  the  author 
of  this  or  that  particular  beautiful  thing,  or  of  all  such 
things  together.  It  has  been  his  fortune  (whether  or 
no  the  greatest  that  can  befall  a  man  of  letters)  to 
have  had  to  consent  to  become,  by  a  process  not  purely 
mystic  and  not  wholly  untraceable — what  shall  we  call 
it  ? — a  Figure.  Tracing  is  needless  now,  for  the  per- 
sonality has  acted  and  the  incarnation  is  full.  There 
he  is — he  has  passed  ineffaceably  into  happy  legend. 
This  case  of  the  figure  is  of  the  rarest  and  the  honour 
surely  of  the  greatest.  In  all  our  literature  we  can 
count  them,  sometimes  with  the  work  and  sometimes 


ROBERT  LOUIS  STEVENSON  25 

without.  The  work  has  often  been  great  and  yet  the 
figure  nil.  Johnson  was  one,  and  Goldsmith  and 
Byron;  and  the  two  former  moreover  not  in  any  degree, 
like  Stevenson,  in  virtue  of  the  element  of  grace.  Was 
it  this  element  that  fixed  the  claim  even  for  Byron  ? 
It  seems  doubtful;  and  the  list  at  all  events  as  we  ap- 
proach our  own  day  shortens  and  stops.  Stevenson 
has  it  at  present — may  we  not  say  ? — pretty  well  to 
himself,  and  it  is  not  one  of  the  scrolls  in  which  he 
least  will  live. 


EMILE  ZOLA 

IF  it  be  true  that  the  critical  spirit  to-day,  in  presence 
of  the  rising  tide  of  prose  fiction,  a  watery  waste  out 
of  which  old  standards  and  landmarks  are  seen  barely 
to  emerge,  like  chimneys  and  the  tops  of  trees  in  a 
country  under  flood — if  it  be  true  that  the  anxious 
observer,  with  the  water  up  to  his  chin,  finds  himself 
asking  for  the  reason  of  the  strange  phenomenon,  for 
its  warrant  and  title,  so  we  likewise  make  out  that 
these  credentials  rather  fail  to  float  on  the  surface. 
We  live  in  a  world  of  wanton  and  importunate  fable, 
we  breathe  its  air  and  consume  its  fruits;  yet  who  shall 
say  that  we  are  able,  when  invited,  to  account  for 
our  preferring  it  so  largely  to  the  world  of  fact  ?  To 
do  so  would  be  to  make  some  adequate  statement  of 
the  good  the  productan  question  does  us.  What  does 
it  do  for  our  life,  our  mind,  our  manners,  our  morals 
— what  does  it  do  that  history,  poetry,  philosophy  may 
not  do,  as  well  or  better,  to  warn,  to  comfort  and  com- 
mand the  countless  thousands  for  whom  and  by  whom 
it  comes  into  being  ?  We  seem  too  often  left  with  our 
riddle  on  our  hands.  The  lame  conclusion  on  which 
we  retreat  is  that  "stories"  are  multiplied,  circulated, 
paid  for,  on  the  scale  of  the  present  hour,  simply  be- 
cause people  "like"  them.  As  to  why  people  should 
like  anything  so  loose  and  mean  as  the  preponderant 
mass  of  the  "output,"  so  little  indebted  for  the  magic 
of  its  action  to  any  mystery  in  the  making,  is  more  than 
the  actual  state  of  our  perceptions  enables  us  to  say. 

26 


£MILE  ZOLA  27 

This  bewilderment  might  be  our  last  word  if  it  were 
not  for  the  occasional  occurrence  of  accidents  especially 
appointed  to  straighten  out  a  little  our  tangle.  We 
are  reminded  that  if  the  unnatural  prosperity  of  the 
wanton  fable  cannot  be  adequately  explained,  it  can  at 
least  be  illustrated  with  a  sharpness  that  is  practically 
an  argument.  An  abstract  solution  failing  we  encoun- 
ter it  in  the  concrete.  We  catch  in  short  a  new  impres- 
sion or,  to  speak  more  truly,  recover  an  old  one.  It 
was  always  there  to  be  had,  but  we  ourselves  throw  off 
an  oblivion,  an  indifference  for  which  there  are  plenty 
of  excuses.  We  become  conscious,  for  our  profit,  of  a 
case,  and  we  see  that  our  mystification  came  from  the 
way  cases  had  appeared  for  so  long  to  fail  us.  None  of 
the  shapeless  forms  about  us  for  the  time  had  attained 
to  the  dignity  of  one.  The  one  I  am  now  conceiving 
as  suddenly  effective — for  which  I  fear  I  must  have 
been  regarding  it  as  somewhat  in  eclipse — is  that  of 
Emile  Zola,  whom,  as  a  manifestation  of  the  sort  we 
are  considering,  three  or  four  striking  facts  have  lately 
combined  to  render  more  objective  and,  so  to  speak, 
more  massive.  His  close  connection  with  the  most 
resounding  of  recent  public  quarrels;  his  premature  and 
disastrous  death;  above  all,  at  the  moment  I  write,  the 
appearance  of  his  last-finished  novel,  bequeathed  to 
his  huge  public  from  beyond  the  grave — these  rapid 
events  have  thrust  him  forward  and  made  him  loom 
abruptly  larger;  much  as  if  our  pedestrian  critic, 
treading  the  dusty  highway,  had  turned  a  sharp  corner. 

It  is  not  assuredly  that  Zola  has  ever  been  veiled  or 
unapparent;  he  had,  on  the  contrary  been  digging  his 
field  these  thirty  years,  and  for  all  passers  to  see,  with 
an  industry  that  kept  him,  after  the  fashion  of  one  of 


28  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

the  grand  grim  sowers  or  reapers  of  his  brother  of  the 
brush,  or  at  least  of  the  canvas,  Jean-Francois  Millet, 
duskily  outlined  against  the  sky.  He  was  there  in  the 
landscape  of  labour — he  had  always  been;  but  he  was 
there  as  a  big  natural  or  pictorial  feature,  a  spreading 
tree,  a  battered  tower,  a  lumpish  round-shouldered  use- 
ful hayrick,  confounded  with  the  air  and  the  weather, 
the  rain  and  the  shine,  the  day  and  the  dusk,  merged 
more  or  less,  as  it  were,  in  the  play  of  the  elements 
themselves.  We  had  got  used  to  him,  and,  thanks  in 
a  measure  just  to  this  stoutness  of  his  presence,  to  the 
long  regularity  of  his  performance,  had  come  to  notice 
him  hardly  more  than  the  dwellers  in  the  marketplace 
notice  the  quarters  struck  by  the  town-clock.  On  top 
of  all  accordingly,  for  our  skeptical  mood,  the  sense  of 
his  work — a  sense  determined  afresh  by  the  strange 
climax  of  his  personal  history — rings  out  almost  with 
violence  as  a  reply  to  our  wonder.  It  is  as  if  an  earth- 
quake or  some  other  rude  interference  had  shaken 
from  the  town-clock  a  note  of  such  unusual  depth  as 
to  compel  attention.  We  therefore  once  more  give 
heed,  and  the  result  of  this  is  that  we  feel  ourselves 
after  a  little  probably  as  much  enlightened  as  we  can 
hope  ever  to  be.  We  have  worked  round  to  the  so 
marked  and  impressive  anomaly  of  the  adoption  of 
the  futile  art  by  one  of  the  stoutest  minds  and  stoutest 
characters  of  our  time.  This  extraordinarily  robust 
worker  has  found  it  good  enough  for  him,  and  if  the 
fact  is,  as  I  say,  anomalous,  we  are  doubtless  helped 
to  conclude  that  by  its  anomalies,  in  future,  the  bank- 
rupt business,  as  we  are  so  often  moved  to  pronounce 
it,  will  most  recover  credit. 

What  is  at  all  events  striking  for  us,  critically  speak- 
ing, is  that,  in  the  midst  of  the  dishonour  it  has  gradu- 


£MILE  ZOLA  29 

ally  harvested  by  triumphant  vulgarity  of  practice,  its 
pliancy  and  applicability  can  still  plead  for  themselves. 
The  curious  contradiction  stands  forth  for  our  relief— 
the  circumstance  that  thirty  years  ago  a  young  man  of 
extraordinary  brain  and  indomitable  purpose,  wishing 
to  give  the  measure  of  these  endowments  in  a  piece  of 
work  supremely  solid,  conceived  and  sat  down  to  Les 
Rougon-Macquart  rather  than  to  an  equal  task  in 
physics,  mathematics,  politics  or  economics.  He  saw 
his  undertaking,  thanks  to  his  patience  and  courage, 
practically  to  a  close;  so  that  it  is  exactly  neither  of  the 
so-called  constructive  sciences  that  happens  to  have  had 
the  benefit,  intellectually  speaking,  of  one  of  the  few 
most  constructive  achievements  of  our  time.  There 
then,  provisionally  at  least,  we  touch  bottom;  we  get  a 
glimpse  of  the  pliancy  and  variety,  the  ideal  of  vivid- 
ness, on  behalf  of  which  our  equivocal  form  may  appeal 
to  a  strong  head.  In  the  name  of  what  ideal  on  its 
own  side,  however,  does  the  strong  head  yield  to  the 
appeal  ?  What  is  the  logic  of  its  so  deeply  committing 
itself?  Zola's  case  seems  to  tell  us,  as  it  tells  us  other 
things.  The  logic  is  in  its  huge  freedom  of  adjust- 
ment to  the  temperament  of  the  worker,  which  it 
carries,  so  to  say,  as  no  other  vehicle  can  do.  It  ex- 
presses fully  and  directly  the  whole  man,  and  big  as 
he  may  be  it  can  still  be  big  enough  for  him  without 
becoming  false  to  its  type.  We  see  this  truth  made 
strong,  from  beginning  to  end,  in  Zola's  work;  we  see 
the  temperament,  we  see  the  whole  man,  with  his  size 
and  all  his  marks,  stored  and  packed  away  in  the  huge 
hold  of  Les  Rougon-Macquart  as  a  cargo  is  packed 
away  on  a  ship.  His  personality  is  the  thing  that 
finally  pervades  and  prevails,  just  as  so  often  on  a 
vessel  the  presence  of  the  cargo  makes  itself  felt  for 
the  assaulted  senses.  What  has  most  come  home  to 


30  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

me  in  reading  him  over  is  that  a  scheme  of  fiction  so 
conducted  is  in  fact  a  capacious  vessel.  It  can  carry 
anything — with  art  and  force  in  the  stowage;  nothing 
in  this  case  will  sink  it.  And  it  is  the  only  form  for 
which  such  a  claim  can  be  made.  All  others  have  to 
confess  to  a  smaller  scope — to  selection,  to  exclusion, 
to  the  danger  of  distortion,  explosion,  combustion. 
The  novel  has  nothing  to  fear  but  sailing  too  light.  It 
will  take  aboard  all  we  bring  in  good  faith  to  the  dock. 

An  intense  vision  of  this  truth  must  have  been  Zola's 
comfort  from  the  earliest  time — the  years,  immediately 
following  the  crash  of  the  Empire,  during  which  he 
settled  himself  to  the  tremendous  task  he  had  mapped 
out.  No  finer  act  of  courage  and  confidence,  I  think, 
is  recorded  in  the  history  of  letters.  The  critic  in 
sympathy  with  him  returns  again  and  again  to  the 
great  wonder  of  it,  in  which  something  so  strange  is 
mixed  with  something  so  august.  Entertained  and 
carried  out  almost  from  the  threshold  of  manhood,  the 
high  project,  the  work  of  a  lifetime,  announces  before- 
hand its  inevitable  weakness  and  yet  speaks  in  the  same 
voice  for  its  admirable,  its  almost  unimaginable  strength. 
The  strength  was  in  the  young  man's  very  person— 
in  his  character,  his  will,  his  passion,  his  fighting 
temper,  his  aggressive  lips,  his  squared  shoulders  (when 
he  "sat  up")  and  overweening  confidence;  his  weak- 
ness was  in  that  inexperience  of  life  from  which  he 
proposed  not  to  suffer,  from  which  he  in  fact  suffered 
on  the  surface  remarkably  little,  and  from  which  he 
was  never  to  suspect,  I  judge,  that  he  had  suffered  at 
all.  I  may  mention  for  the  interest  of  it  that,  meeting 
him  during  his  first  short  visit  to  London — made  sev- 
eral years  before  his  stay  in  England  during  the  Dreyfus 


EMILE  ZOLA  3i 

trial — I  received  a  direct  impression  of  him  that  was 
more  informing  than  any  previous  study.  I  had  seen 
him  a  little,  in  Paris,  years  before  that,  when  this  im- 
pression was  a  perceptible  promise,  and  I  was  now  to 
perceive  how  time  had  made  it  good.  It  consisted, 
simply  stated,  in  his  fairly  bristling  with  the  betrayal 
that  nothing  whatever  had  happened  to  him  in  life  but 
to  write  Les  Rougon-Macquart.  It  was  even  for  that 
matter  almost  more  as  if  Les  Rougon-Macquart  had 
written  him,  written  him  as  he  stood  and  sat,  as  he 
looked  and  spoke,  as  the  long,  concentrated,  merciless 
effort  had  made  and  stamped  and  left  him.  Some- 
thing very  fundamental  was  to  happen  to  him  in  due 
course,  it  is  true,  shaking  him  to  his  base;  fate  was  not 
wholly  to  cheat  him  of  an  independent  evolution.  Re- 
calling him  from  this  London  hour  one  strongly  felt 
during  the  famous  "Affair"  that  his  outbreak  in  con- 
nection with  it  was  the  act  of  a  man  with  arrears  of 
personal  history  to  make  up,  the  act  of  a  spirit  for 
which  life,  or  for  which  at  any  rate  freedom,  had  been 
too  much  postponed,  treating  itself  at  last  to  a  luxury 
of  experience. 

I  welcomed  the  general  impression  at  all  events— 
I  intimately  entertained  it;  it  represented  so  many 
things,  it  suggested,  just  as  it  was,  such  a  lesson.  You 
could  neither  have  everything  nor  be  everything — you 
had  to  choose;  you  could  not  at  once  sit  firm  at  your 
job  and  wander  through  space  inviting  initiations. 
The  author  of  Les  Rougon-Macquart  had  had  all 
those,  certainly,  that  this  wonderful  company  could 
bring  him;  but  I  can  scarce  express  how  it  was  implied 
in  him  that  his  time  had  been  fruitfully  passed  with 
them  alone.  His  artistic  evolution  struck  one  thus  as, 


32  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

in  spite  of  its  magnitude,  singularly  simple,  and  evi- 
dence of  the  simplicity  seems  further  offered  by  his  last 
production,  of  which  we  have  just  come  into  possession. 
"Verite"  truly  does  give  the  measure,  makes  the 
author's  high  maturity  join  hands  with  his  youth, 
marks  the  rigid  straightness  of  his  course  from  point 
to  point.  He  had  seen  his  horizon  and  his  fixed  goal 
from  the  first,  and  no  cross-scent,  no  new  distance,  no 
blue  gap  in  the  hills  to  right  or  to  left  ever  tempted 
him  to  stray.  "Verite,"  of  which  I  shall  have  more  to 
say,  is  in  fact,  as  a  moral  finality  and  the  crown  of  an 
edifice,  one  of  the  strangest  possible  performances. 
Machine-minted  and  made  good  by  an  immense  ex- 
pertness,  it  yet  makes  us  ask  how,  for  disinterested 
observation  and  perception,  the  writer  had  used  so 
much  time  and  so  much  acquisition,  and  how  he  can 
all  along  have  handled  so  much  material  without  some 
larger  subjective  consequence.  We  really  rub  our  eyes 
in  other  words  to  see  so  great  an  intellectual  adventure 
as  Les  Rougon-Macquart  come  to  its  end  in  deep 
desert  sand.  Difficult  truly  to  read,  because  showing 
him  at  last  almost  completely  a  prey  to  the  danger 
that  had  for  a  long  time  more  and  more  dogged  his 
steps,  the  danger  of  the  mechanical  all  confident  and 
triumphant,  the  book  is  nevertheless  full  of  interest 
for  a  reader  desirous  to  penetrate.  It  speaks  with 
more  distinctness  of  the  author's  temperament,  tone 
and  manner  than  if,  like  several  of  his  volumes,  it 
achieved  or  enjoyed  a  successful  life  of  its  own.  Its 
heavy  completeness,  with  all  this,  as  of  some  prodig- 
iously neat,  strong  and  complicated  scaffolding  con- 
structed by  a  firm  of  builders  for  the  erection  of  a  house 
whose  foundations  refuse  to  bear  it  and  that  is  unable 
therefore  to  rise — its  very  betrayal  of  a  method  and  a 


£MILE  ZOLA  33 

habit  more  than  adequate,  on  past  occasions,  to  similar 
ends,  carries  us  back  to  the  original  rare  exhibition,  the 
grand  assurance  and  grand  patience  with  which  the 
system  was  launched. 

If  it  topples  over,  the  system,  by  its  own  weight  in 
these  last  applications  of  it,  that  only  makes  the  his- 
tory of  its  prolonged  success  the  more  curious  and, 
speaking  for  myself,  the  spectacle  of  its  origin  more 
attaching.  Readers  of  my  generation  will  remember 
well  the  publication  of  "La  Conquete  de  Plassans" 
and  the  portent,  indefinable  but  irresistible,  after  peru- 
sal of  the  volume,  conveyed  in  the  general  rubric  under 
which  it  was  a  first  instalment,  Natural  and  Social 
History  of  a  Family  under  the  Second  Empire.  It 
squared  itself  there  at  its  ease,  the  announcement,  from 
the  first,  and  we  were  to  learn  promptly  enough  what  a 
fund  of  life  it  masked.  It  was  like  the  mouth  of  a  cave 
with  a  signboard  hung  above,  or  better  still  perhaps 
like  the  big  booth  at  a  fair  with  the  name  of  the  show 
across  the  flapping  canvas.  One  strange  animal  after 
another  stepped  forth  into  the  light,  each  in  its  way  a 
monster  bristling  and  spotted,  each  a  curiosity  of  that 
"natural  history"  in  the  name  of  which  we  were  ad- 
dressed, though  it  was  doubtless  not  till  the  issue  of 
"L'Assommoir"  that  the  true  type  of  the  monstrous 
seemed  to  be  reached.  The  enterprise,  for  those  who 
had  attention,  was  even  at  a  distance  impressive,  and 
the  nearer  the  critic  gets  to  it  retrospectively  the  more 
so  it  becomes.  The  pyramid  had  been  planned  and 
the  site  staked  out,  but  the  young  builder  stood  there, 
in  his  sturdy  strength,  with  no  equipment  save  his  two 
hands  and,  as  we  may  say,  his  wheelbarrow  and  his 
trowel.  His  pile  of  material — of  stone,  brick  and  rub- 


34  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ble  or  whatever — was  of  the  smallest,  but  this  he  ap- 
parently felt  as  the  least  of  his  difficulties.  Poor,  un- 
instructed,  unacquainted,  unintroduced,  he  set  up  his 
subject  wholly  from  the  outside,  proposing  to  himself 
wonderfully  to  get  into  it,  into  its  depths,  as  he  went. 

If  we  imagine  him  asking  himself  what  he  knew  of 
the  "social"  life  of  the  second  Empire  to  start  with, 
we  imagine  him  also  answering  in  all  honesty:  "I  have 
my  eyes  and  my  ears — I  have  all  my  senses:  I  have 
what  I've  seen  and  heard,  what  I've  smelled  and  tasted 
and  touched.  And  then  I've  my  curiosity  and  my  per- 
tinacity; I've  libraries,  books,  newspapers,  witnesses, 
the  material,  from  step  to  step,  of  an  enquete.  And 
then  I've  my  genius — that  is,  my  imagination,  my 
passion,  my  sensibility  to  life.  Lastly  I've  my  method, 
and  that  will  be  half  the  battle.  Best  of  all  perhaps 
even,  I've  plentiful  lack  of  doubt."  Of  the  absence  in 
him  of  a  doubt,  indeed  of  his  inability,  once  his  direc- 
tion taken,  to  entertain  so  much  as  the  shadow  of  one, 
"Verite"  is  a  positive  monument — which  again  rep- 
resents in  this  way  the  unity  of  his  tone  and  the  meet- 
ing of  his  extremes.  If  we  remember  that  his  design 
was  nothing  if  not  architectural,  that  a  "majestic 
whole,"  a  great  balanced  fa9ade,  with  all  its  orders 
and  parts,  that  a  singleness  of  mass  and  a  unity  of 
effect,  in  fine,  were  before  him  from  the  first,  his  no- 
tion of  picking  up  his  bricks  as  he  proceeded  becomes, 
in  operation,  heroic.  It  is  not  in  the  least  as  a  record 
of  failure  for  him  that  I  note  this  particular  fact  of 
the  growth  of  the  long  series  as  on  the  whole  the  live- 
liest interest  it  has  to  offer.  "I  don't  know  my  subject, 
but  I  must  live  into  it;  I  don't  know  life,  but  I  must 
learn  it  as  I  work" — that  attitude  and  programme  rep- 


£MILE  ZOLA  35 

resent,  to  my  sense,  a  drama  more  intense  on  the 
worker's  own  part  than  any  of  the  dramas  he  was  to 
invent  and  put  before  us. 

It  was  the  fortune,  it  was  in  a  manner  the  doom,  of 
Les  Rougon-Macquart  to  deal  with  things  almost 
always  in  gregarious  form,  to  be  a  picture  of  numbers, 
of  classes,  crowds,  confusions,  movements,  industries — 
and  this  for  a  reason  of  which  it  will  be  interesting  to 
attempt  some  account.  The  individual  life  is,  if  not 
wholly  absent,  reflected  in  coarse  and  common,  in 
generalised  terms;  whereby  we  arrive  precisely  at  the 
oddity  just  named,  the  circumstance  that,  looking  out 
somewhere,  and  often  woefully  athirst,  for  the  taste 
of  fineness,  we  find  it  not  in  the  fruits  of  our  author's 
fancy,  but  in  a  different  matter  altogether.  We  get 
it  in  the  very  history  of  his  effort,  the  image  itself  of 
his  lifelong  process,  comparatively  so  personal,  so 
spiritual  even,  and,  through  all  its  patience  and  pain,  of 
a  quality  so  much  more  distinguished  than  the  qualities 
he  succeeds  in  attributing  to  his  figures  even  when  he 
most  aims  at  distinction.  There  can  be  no  question 
in  these  narrow  limits  of  my  taking  the  successive  vol- 
umes one  by  one — all  the  more  that  our  sense  of  the 
exhibition  is  as  little  as  possible  an  impression  of 
parts  and  books,  of  particular  "plots"  and  persons. 
It  produces  the  effect  of  a  mass  of  imagery  in  which 
shades  are  sacrificed,  the  effect  of  character  and  pas- 
sion in  the  lump  or  by  the  ton.  The  fullest,  the  most 
characteristic  episodes  affect  us  like  a  sounding  chorus 
or  procession,  as  with  a  hubbub  of  voices  and  a  multi- 
tudinous tread  of  feet.  The  setter  of  the  mass  into 
motion,  he  himself,  in  the  crowd,  figures  best,  with 
whatever  queer  idiosyncrasies,  excrescences  and  gaps,  a 


36  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

being  of  a  substance  akin  to  our  own.  Taking  him  as 
we  must,  I  repeat,  for  quite  heroic,  the  interest  of 
detail  in  him  is  the  interest  of  his  struggle  at  every  point 
with  his  problem. 

The  sense  for  crowds  and  processions,  for  the  gross 
and  the  general,  was  largely  the  result  of  this  predica- 
ment, of  the  disproportion  between  his  scheme  and 
his  material — though  it  was  certainly  also  in  part  an 
effect  of  his  particular  turn  of  mind.  What  the  reader 
easily  discerns  in  him  is  the  sturdy  resolution  with 
which  breadth  and  energy  supply  the  place  of  penetra- 
tion. He  rests  to  his  utmost  on  his  documents,  de- 
vours and  assimilates  them,  makes  them  yield  him 
extraordinary  appearances  of  life;  but  in  his  way  he 
too  improvises  in  the  grand  manner,  the  manner  of 
Walter  Scott  and  of  Dumas  the  elder.  We  feel  that 
he  has  to  improvise  for  his  moral  and  social  world,  the 
world  as  to  which  vision  and  opportunity  must  come, 
if  they  are  to  come  at  all,  unhurried  and  unhustled — 
must  take  their  own  time,  helped  undoubtedly  more 
or  less  by  blue-books,  reports  and  interviews,  by  in- 
quiries "on  the  spot,"  but  never  wholly  replaced  by 
such  substitutes  without  a  general  disfigurement. 
Vision  and  opportunity  reside  in  a  personal  sense  and  a 
personal  history,  and  no  short  cut  to  them  in  the  in- 
terest of  plausible  fiction  has  ever  been  discovered. 
The  short  cut,  it  is  not  too  much  to  say,  was  with  Zola 
the  subject  of  constant  ingenious  experiment,  and  it  is 
largely  to  this  source,  I  surmise,  that  we  owe  the  cele- 
brated element  of  his  grossness.  He  was  obliged  to 
be  gross,  on  his  system,  or  neglect  to  his  cost  an  in- 
valuable aid  to  representation,  as  well  as  one  that  ap- 
parently struck  him  as  lying  close  at  hand;  and  I  can- 


£MILE  ZOLA  37 

not  withhold  my  frank  admiration  from  the  courage  and 
consistency  with  which  he  faced  his  need. 

His  general  subject  in  the  last  analysis  was  the  na- 
ture of  man;  in  dealing  with  which  he  took  up,  obvious- 
ly, the  harp  of  most  numerous  strings.  His  business  was 
to  make  these  strings  sound  true,  and  there  were  none 
that  he  did  not,  so  far  as  his  general  economy  permitted, 
persistently  try.  What  happened  then  was  that  many 
— say  about  half,  and  these,  as  I  have  noted,  the  most 
silvered,  the  most  golden — refused  to  give  out  their 
music.  They  would  only  sound  false,  since  (as  with 
all  his  earnestness  he  must  have  felt)  he  could  com- 
mand them,  through  want  of  skill,  of  practice,  of  ear, 
to  none  of  the  right  harmony.  What  therefore  was 
more  natural  than  that,  still  splendidly  bent  on  pro- 
ducing his  illusion,  he  should  throw  himself  on  the 
strings  he  might  thump  with  effect,  and  should  work 
them,  as  our  phrase  is,  for  all  they  were  worth  ?  The 
nature  of  man,  he  had  plentiful  warrant  for  holding, 
is  an  extraordinary  mixture,  but  the  great  thing  was 
to  represent  a  sufficient  part  of  it  to  show  that  it  was 
solidly,  palpably,  commonly  the  nature.  With  this 
preoccupation  he  doubtless  fell  into  extravagance- 
there  was  clearly  so  much  to  lead  him  on.  The  coarser 
side  of  his  subject,  based  on  the  community  of  all  the 
instincts,  was  for  instance  the  more  practicable  side,  a 
sphere  the  vision  of  which  required  but  the  general 
human,  scarcely  more  than  the  plain  physical,  initi- 
ation, and  dispensed  thereby  conveniently  enough  with 
special  introductions  or  revelations.  A  free  entry  into 
this  sphere  was  undoubtedly  compatible  with  a  youth- 
ful career  as  hampered  right  and  left  even  as  Zola's 
own. 


38  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

He  was  in  prompt  possession  thus  of  the  range  of 
sympathy  that  he  could  cultivate,  though  it  must  be 
added  that  the  complete  exercise  of  that  sympathy 
might  have  encountered  an  obstacle  that  would  some- 
what undermine  his  advantage.  Our  friend  might 
have  found  himself  able,  in  other  words,  to  pay  to 
the  instinctive,  as  I  have  called  it,  only  such  tribute 
as  protesting  taste  (his  own  dose  of  it)  permitted.  Yet 
there  it  was  again  that  fortune  and  his  temperament 
served  him.  Taste  as  he  knew  it,  taste  as  his  own 
constitution  supplied  it,  proved  to  have  nothing  to  say 
to  the  matter.  His  own  dose  of  the  precious  elixir 
had  no  perceptible  regulating  power.  Paradoxical  as 
the  remark  may  sound,  this  accident  was  positively  to 
operate  as  one  of  his  greatest  felicities.  There  are 
parts  of  his  work,  those  dealing  with  romantic  or  poetic 
elements,  in  which  the  inactivity  of  the  principle  in 
question  is  sufficiently  hurtful;  but  it  surely  should 
not  be  described  as  hurtful  to  such  pictures  as  "Le 
Ventre  de  Paris,"  as  "L'Assommoir,"  as  "Germinal." 
The  conception  on  which  each  of  these  productions 
rests  is  that  of  a  world  with  which  taste  has  nothing  to 
do,  and  though  the  act  of  representation  may  be  justly 
held,  as  an  artistic  act,  to  involve  its  presence,  the  dis- 
crimination would  probably  have  been  in  fact,  given 
the  particular  illusion  sought,  more  detrimental  than 
the  deficiency.  There  was  a  great  outcry,  as  we  all 
remember,  over  the  rank  materialism  of  "L'Assom- 
moir," but  who  cannot  see  to-day  how  much  a  milder 
infusion  of  it  would  have  told  against  the  close  em- 
brace of  the  subject  aimed  at  ?  "L'Assommoir"  is  the 
nature  of  man — but  not  his  finer,  nobler,  cleaner  or 
more  cultivated  nature;  it  is  the  image  of  his  free  in- 
stincts, the  better  and  the  worse,  the  better  struggling 


fiMILE  ZOLA  39 

as  they  can,  gasping  for  light  and  air,  the  worse  making 
themselves  at  home  in  darkness,  ignorance  and  poverty. 
The  whole  handling  makes  for  emphasis  and  scale,  and 
it  is  not  to  be  measured  how,  as  a  picture  of  conditions, 
the  thing  would  have  suffered  from  timidity.  The 
qualification  of  the  painter  was  precisely  his  stoutness 
of  stomach,  and  we  scarce  exceed  in  saying  that  to 
have  taken  in  and  given  out  again  less  of  the  infected 
air  would,  with  such  a  resource,  have  meant  the  waste 
of  a  faculty. 

I  may  add  in  this  connection  moreover  that  refine- 
ment of  intention  did  on  occasion  and  after  a  fashion 
of  its  own  unmistakably  preside  at  these  experiments; 
making  the  remark  in  order  to  have  done  once  for  all 
with  a  feature  of  Zola's  literary  physiognomy  that  ap- 
pears to  have  attached  the  gaze  of  many  persons  to 
the  exclusion  of  every  other.  There  are  judges  in 
these  matters  so  perversely  preoccupied  that  for  them 
to  see  anywhere  the  "improper"  is  for  them  straight- 
way to  cease  to  see  anything  else.  The  said  improper, 
looming  supremely  large  and  casting  all  the  varieties 
of  the  proper  quite  into  the  shade,  suffers  thus  in  their 
consciousness  a  much  greater  extension  than  it  ever 
claimed,  and  this  consciousness  becomes,  for  the  edi- 
fication of  many  and  the  information  of  a  few,  a  colossal 
reflector  and  record  of  it.  Much  may  be  said,  in  re- 
lation to  some  of  the  possibilities  of  the  nature  of  man, 
of  the  nature  in  especial  of  the  "people,"  on  the  defect 
of  our  author's  sense  of  proportion.  But  the  sense  of 
proportion  of  many  of  those  he  has  scandalised  would 
take  us  further  yet.  I  recall  at  all  events  as  relevant 
— for  it  comes  under  a  very  attaching  general  head- 
two  occasions  of  long  ago,  two  Sunday  afternoons  in 


40  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Paris,  on  which  I  found  the  question  of  intention  very 
curiously  lighted.  Several  men  of  letters  of  a  group 
in  which  almost  every  member  either  had  arrived  at 
renown  or  was  well  on  his  way  to  it,  were  assembled 
under  the  roof  of  the  most  distinguished  of  their  num- 
ber, where  they  exchanged  free  confidences  on  current 
work,  on  plans  and  ambitions,  in  a  manner  full  of  in- 
terest for  one  never  previously  privileged  to  see  ar- 
tistic conviction,  artistic  passion  (at  least  on  the  liter- 
ary ground)  so  systematic  and  so  articulate.  "Well,  I 
on  my  side,"  I  remember  Zola's  saying,  "am  engaged 
on  a  book,  a  study  of  the  mosurs  of  the  people,  for  which 
I  am  making  a  collection  of  all  the  'bad  words,'  the 
gros  mots,  of  the  language,  those  with  which  the  vo- 
cabulary of  the  people,  those  with  which  their  familiar 
talk,  bristles."  I  was  struck  with  the  tone  in  which 
he  made  the  announcement — without  bravado  and 
without  apology,  as  an  interesting  idea  that  had  come 
to  him  and  that  he  was  working,  really  to  arrive  at 
character  and  particular  truth,  with  all  his  conscience; 
just  as  I  was  struck  with  the  unqualified  interest  that 
his  plan  excited.  It  was  on  a  plan  that  he  was  work- 
ing— formidably,  almost  grimly,  as  his  fatigued  face 
showed;  and  the  whole  consideration  of  this  interesting 
element  partook  of  the  general  seriousness. 

But  there  comes  back  to  me  also  as  a  companion- 
piece  to  this  another  day,  after  some  interval,  on  which 
the  interest  was  excited  by  the  fact  that  the  work  for 
love  of  which  the  brave  license  had  been  taken  was 
actually  under  the  ban  of  the  daily  newspaper  that  had 
engaged  to  "serialise"  it.  Publication  had  definitively 
ceased.  The  thing  had  run  a  part  of  its  course,  but  it 
had  outrun  the  courage  of  editors  and  the  curiosity 


£MILE  ZOLA  41 

of  subscribers — that  stout  curiosity  to  which  it  had 
evidently  in  such  good  faith  been  addressed.  The 
chorus  of  contempt  for  the  ways  of  such  people,  their 
pusillanimity,  their  superficiality,  vulgarity,  intellec- 
tual platitude,  was  the  striking  note  on  this  occa- 
sion; for  the  journal  impugned  had  declined  to  pro- 
ceed and  the  serial,  broken  off,  been  obliged,  if  I  am 
not  mistaken,  to  seek  the  hospitality  of  other  columns, 
secured  indeed  with  no  great  difficulty.  The  com- 
position so  qualified  for  future  fame  was  none  other, 
as  I  was  later  to  learn,  than  "L'Assommoir";  and  my 
reminiscence  has  perhaps  no  greater  point  than  in 
connecting  itself  with  a  matter  always  dear  to  the 
critical  spirit,  especially  when  the  latter  has  not  too 
completely  elbowed  out  the  romantic — the  matter  of 
the  "origins,"  the  early  consciousness,  early  steps, 
early  tribulations,  early  obscurity,  as  so  often  happens, 
of  productions  finally  crowned  by  time. 

Their  greatness  is  for  the  most  part  a  thing  that  has 
originally  begun  so  small;  and  this  impression  is  par- 
ticularly strong  when  we  have  been  in  any  degree 
present,  so  to  speak,  at  the  birth.  The  course  of  the 
matter  is  apt  to  tend  preponderantly  in  that  case  to 
enrich  our  stores  of  irony.  In  the  eventual  conquest  of 
consideration  by  an  abused  book  we  recognise,  in 
other  terms,  a  drama  of  romantic  interest,  a  drama 
often  with  large  comic  no  less  than  with  fine  pathetic 
interweavings.  It  may  of  course  be  said  in  this  par- 
ticular connection  that  "L'Assommoir"  had  not  been 
one  of  the  literary  things  that  creep  humbly  into  the 
world.  Its  "success"  may  be  cited  as  almost  insolently 
prompt,  and  the  fact  remains  true  if  the  idea  of  suc- 
cess be  restricted,  after  the  inveterate  fashion,  to  the 


42  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

idea  of  circulation.  What  remains  truer  still,  however, 
is  that  for  the  critical  spirit  circulation  mostly  matters 
not  the  least  little  bit,  and  it  is  of  the  success  with  which 
the  history  of  Gervaise  and  Coupeau  nestles  in  that 
capacious  bosom,  even  as  the  just  man  sleeps  in  Abra- 
ham's, that  I  here  speak.  But  it  is  a  point  I  may  better 
refer  to  a  moment  hence. 

Though  a  summary  study  of  Zola  need  not  too 
anxiously  concern  itself  with  book  after  book — always 
with  a  partial  exception  from  this  remark  for  "L'As- 
sommoir" — groups  and  varieties  none  the  less  exist  in 
the  huge  series,  aids  to  discrimination  without  which 
no  measure  of  the  presiding  genius  is  possible.  These 
divisions  range  themselves  to  my  sight,  roughly  speak- 
ing, however,  as  scarce  more  than  three  in  number — 
I  mean  if  the  ten  volumes  of  the  CEuvres  Critiques 
and  the  Theatre  be  left  out  of  account.  The  critical 
volumes  in  especial  abound  in  the  characteristic,  as 
they  were  also  a  wondrous  addition  to  his  sum  of 
achievement  during  his  most  strenuous  years.  But  I 
am  forced  not  to  consider  them.  The  two  groups 
constituted  after  the  close  of  Les  Rougon-Macquart 

-"Les  Trois  Villes"  and  the  incomplete  "Quatre 
Evangiles" — distribute  themselves  easily  among  the 
three  types,  or,  to  speak  more  exactly,  stand  together 
under  one  of  the  three.  This  one,  so  comprehensive 
as  to  be  the  author's  main  exhibition,  includes  to  my 
sense  all  his  best  volumes — to  the  point  in  fact  of  pro- 
ducing an  effect  of  distinct  inferiority  for  those  outside 
of  it,  which  are,  luckily  for  his  general  credit,  the  less 
numerous.  It  is  so  inveterately  pointed  out  in  any 
allusion  to  him  that  one  shrinks,  in  repeating  it,  from 
sounding  flat;  but  as  he  was  admirably  equipped  from 
the  start  for  the  evocation  of  number  and  quantity,  so 


£MILE  ZOLA  43 

those  of  his  social  pictures  that  most  easily  surpass 
the  others  are  those  in  which  appearances,  the  appear- 
ances familiar  to  him,  are  at  once  most  magnified  and 
most  multiplied. 

To  make  his  characters  swarm,  and  to  make  the 
great  central  thing  they  swarm  about  "as  large  as  life," 
portentously,  heroically  big,  that  was  the  task  he  set 
himself  very  nearly  from  the  first,  that  was  the  secret 
he  triumphantly  mastered.  Add  that  the  big  central 
thing  was  always  some  highly  representative  institu- 
tion or  industry  of  the  France  of  his  time,  some  seated 
Moloch  of  custom,  of  commerce,  of  faith,  lending  it- 
self to  portrayal  through  its  abuses  and  excesses,  its 
idol-face  and  great  devouring  mouth,  and  we  embrace 
the  main  lines  of  his  attack.  In  "Le  Ventre  de  Paris" 
he  had  dealt  with  the  life  of  the  huge  Halles,  the  gen- 
eral markets  and  their  supply,  the  personal  forces, 
personal  situations,  passions,  involved  in  (strangest  of 
all  subjects)  the  alimentation  of  the  monstrous  city, 
the  city  whose  victualling  occupies  so  inordinately 
much  of  its  consciousness.  Paris  richly  gorged,  Paris 
sublime  and  indifferent  in  her  assurance  (so  all  unlike 
poor  Oliver's)  of  ""more,"  figures  here  the  theme  it- 
self, lies  across  the  scene  like  some  vast  ruminant 
creature  breathing  in  a  cloud  of  parasites.  The  book 
was  the  first  of  the  long  series  to  show  the  full  freedom 
of  the  author's  hand,  though  "La  Curee"  had  already 
been  symptomatic.  This  freedom,  after  an  interval, 
broke  out  on  a  much  bigger  scale  in  "L'Assommoir," 
in  "Au  Bonheur  des  Dames,"  in  "Germinal,"  in  "La 
Bete  Humaine,"  in  "L'Argent,"  in  "La  Debacle," 
and  then  again,  though  more  mechanically  and  with 
much  of  the  glory  gone,  in  the  more  or  less  wasted 


44  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

energy  of  "Lourdes,"  "Rome,"  "Paris,"  of  "Fecon- 
dite,"  "Travail"  and  "Verite." 

"Au  Bonheur  des  Dames"  handles  the  colossal 
modern  shop,  traces  the  growth  of  such  an  organisa- 
tion as  the  Bon  Marche  or  the  Magasin-du-Louvre, 
sounds  the  abysses  of  its  inner  life,  marshals  its  popu- 
lation, its  hierarchy  of  clerks,  counters,  departments, 
divisions  and  sub-divisions,  plunges  into  the  labyrinth 
of  the  mutual  relations  of  its  staff,  and  above  all  traces 
its  ravage  amid  the  smaller  fry  of  the  trade,  of  all  the 
trades,  pictures  these  latter  gasping  for  breath  in  an 
air  pumped  clean  by  its  mighty  lungs.  "Germinal" 
revolves  about  the  coal-mines  of  Flemish  France,  with 
the  subterranean  world  of  the  pits  for  its  central  pres- 
ence, just  as  "La  Bete  Humaine"  has  for  its  protago- 
nist a  great  railway  and  "L'Argent"  presents  in  terms 
of  human  passion — mainly  of  human  baseness — the 
fury  of  the  Bourse  and  the  monster  of  Credit.  "La 
Debacle"  takes  up  with  extraordinary  breadth  the  first 
act  of  the  Franco-Prussian  war,  the  collapse  at  Sedan, 
and  the  titles  of  the  six  volumes  of  The  Three  Cities 
and  the  Four  Gospels  sufficiently  explain  them.  I 
may  mention,  however,  for  the  last  lucidity,  that 
among  these  "Fecondite"  manipulates,  with  an  amaz- 
ing misapprehension  of  means  to  ends,  of  remedies  to 
ills,  no  less  thickly  peopled  a  theme  than  that  of  the 
decline  in  the  French  birth-rate,  and  that  "Verite" 
presents  a  fictive  equivalent  of  the  Dreyfus  case,  with 
a  vast  and  elaborate  picture  of  the  battle  in  France 
between  lay  and  clerical  instruction.  I  may  even 
further  mention,  to  clear  the  ground,  that  with  the 
close  of  Les  Rougon-Macquart  the  diminution  of 
freshness  in  the  author's  energy,  the  diminution  of  in- 


£MILE  ZOLA  45 

tensity  and,  in  short,  of  quality,  becomes  such  as  to 
render  sadly  difficult  a  happy  life  with  some  of  the 
later  volumes.  Happiness  of  the  purest  strain  never 
indeed,  in  old  absorptions  of  Zola,  quite  sat  at  the 
feast;  but  there  was  mostly  a  measure  of  coercion,  a 
spell  without  a  charm.  From  these  last-named  pro- 
ductions of  the  climax  everything  strikes  me  as  absent 
but  quantity  ("Verite,"  for  instance,  is,  with  the  pos- 
sible exception  of  "Nana,"  the  longest  of  the  list); 
though  indeed  there  is  something  impressive  in  the 
way  his  quantity  represents  his  patience. 

There  are  efforts  here  at  stout  perusal  that,  frankly, 
I  have  been  unable  to  carry  through,  and  I  should 
verily  like,  in  connection  with  the  vanity  of  these,  to 
dispose  on  the  spot  of  the  sufficiently  strange  phenom- 
enon constituted  by  what  I  have  called  the  climax. 
It  embodies  in  fact  an  immense  anomaly;  it  casts  back 
over  Zola's  prime  and  his  middle  years  the  queerest 
grey  light  of  eclipse.  Nothing  moreover — nothing 
"literary" — was  ever  so  odd  as  in  this  matter  the  whole 
turn  of  the  case,  the  consummation  so  logical  yet  so 
unexpected.  Writers  have  grown  old  and  withered 
and  failed;  they  have  grown  weak  and  sad;  they  have 
lost  heart,  lost  ability,  yielded  in  one  way  or  another 
—the  possible  ways  being  so  numerous — to  the  cruelty 
of  time.  But  the  singular  doom  of  this  genius,  and 
which  began  to  multiply  its  symptoms  ten  years  before 
his  death,  was  to  find,  with  life,  at  fifty,  still  rich  in 
him,  strength  only  to  undermine  all  the  "authority" 
he  had  gathered.  He  had  not  grown  old  and  he  had 
not  grown  feeble;  he  had  only  grown  all  too  wrongly 
insistent,  setting  himself  to  wreck,  poetically,  his  so 
massive  identity — to  wreck  it  in  the  very  waters  in 


46  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

which  he  had  formally  arrayed  his  victorious  fleet. 
(I  say  "poetically"  on  purpose  to  give  him  the  just 
benefit  of  all  the  beauty  of  his  power.)  The  process 
of  the  disaster,  so  full  of  the  effect,  though  so  without 
the  intention,  of  perversity,  is  difficult  to  trace  in  a  few 
words;  it  may  best  be  indicated  by  an  example  or  two 
of  its  action. 

The  example  that  perhaps  most  comes  home  to  me 
is  again  connected  with  a  personal  reminiscence.  In 
the  course  of  some  talk  that  I  had  with  him  during 
his  first  visit  to  England  I  happened  to  ask  him  what 
opportunity  to  travel  (if  any)  his  immense  application 
had  ever  left  him,  and  whether  in  particular  he  had  been 
able  to  see  Italy,  a  country  from  which  I  had  either 
just  returned  or  which  I  was  luckily — not  having  the 
Natural  History  of  a  Family  on  my  hands — about  to 
revisit.  "All  I've  done,  alas,"  he  replied,  "was,  the 
other  year,  in  the  course  of  a  little  journey  to  the  south, 
to  my  own  pays — all  that  has  been  possible  was  then 
to  make  a  little  dash  as  far  as  Genoa,  a  matter  of  only 
a  few  days."  "Le  Docteur  Pascal,"  the  conclusion 
of  Les  Rougon-Macquart,  had  appeared  shortly  before, 
and  it  further  befell  that  I  asked  him  what  plans  he 
had  for  the  future,  now  that,  still  dans  la  force  de 
I'age,  he  had  so  cleared  the  ground.  I  shall  never 
forget  the  fine  promptitude  of  his  answer — "Oh,  I 
shall  begin  at  once  Les  Trois  Villes."  "And  which 
cities  are  they  to  be?"  The  reply  was  finer  still — 
"Lourdes,  Paris,  Rome." 

It  was  splendid  for  confidence  and  cheer,  but  it  left 
me,  I  fear,  more  or  less  gaping,  and  it  was  to  give  me 
afterwards  the  key,  critically  speaking,  to  many  a 


£MILE  ZOLA  47 

mystery.  It  struck  me  as  breathing  to  an  almost 
tragic  degree  the  fatuity  of  those  in  whom  the  gods 
stimulate  that  vice  to  their  ruin.  He  was  an  honest 
man — he  had  always  bristled  with  it  at  every  pore; 
but  no  artistic  reverse  was  inconceivable  for  an  adven- 
turer who,  stating  in  one  breath  that  his  knowledge  of 
Italy  consisted  of  a  few  days  spent  at  Genoa,  was 
ready  to  declare  in  the  next  that  he  had  planned,  on  a 
scale,  a  picture  of  Rome.  It  flooded  his  career,  to  my 
sense,  with  light;  it  showed  how  he  had  marched  from 
subject  to  subject  and  had  "got  up"  each  in  turn- 
showing  also  how  consummately  he  had  reduced  such 
getting-up  to  an  artifice.  He  had  success  and  a  rare 
impunity  behind  him,  but  nothing  would  now  be  so 
interesting  as  to  see  if  he  could  again  play  the  trick. 
One  would  leave  him,  and  welcome,  Lourdes  and 
Paris — he  had  already  dealt,  on  a  scale,  with  his  own 
country  and  people.  But  was  the  adored  Rome  also 
to  be  his  on  such  terms,  the  Rome  he  was  already 
giving  away  before  possessing  an  inch  of  it  ?  One 
thought  of  one's  own  frequentations,  saturations — a 
history  of  long  years,  and  of  how  the  effect  of  them 
had  somehow  been  but  to  make  the  subject  too  august. 
Was  he  to  find  it  easy  through  a  visit  of  a  month  or  two 
with  "introductions"  and  a  Baedeker? 

It  was  not  indeed  that  the  Baedeker  and  the  intro- 
ductions didn't  show,  to  my  sense,  at  that  hour,  as 
extremely  suggestive;  they  were  positively  a  part  of 
the  light  struck  out  by  his  announcement.  They  de- 
fined the  system  on  which  he  had  brought  Les  Rougon- 
Macquart  safely  into  port.  He  had  had  his  Baedeker 
and  his  introductions  for  "Germinal,"  for  "L'Assom- 
moir,"  for  "L'Argent,"  for  "La  Debacle,"  for  "Au 


48  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Bonheur  des  Dames";  which  advantages,  which  re- 
searches, had  clearly  been  all  the  more  in  character  for 
being  documentary,  extractive,  a  matter  of  renseigne- 
ments,  published  or  private,  even  when  most  mixed 
with  personal  impressions  snatched,  with  enquetes  sur 
les  lieux,  with  facts  obtained  from  the  best  authorities, 
proud  and  happy  to  co-operate  in  so  famous  a  connec- 
tion. That  was,  as  we  say,  all  right,  all  the  more  that 
the  process,  to  my  imagination,  became  vivid  and  was 
wonderfully  reflected  back  from  its  fruits.  There  were 
the  fruits — so  it  hadn't  been  presumptuous.  Presump- 
tion, however,  was  now  to  begin,  and  what  omen 
mightn't  there  be  in  its  beginning  with  such  compla- 
cency ?  Well,  time  would  show — as  time  in  due  course 
effectually  did.  "Rome,"  as  the  second  volume  of 
The  Three  Cities,  appeared  with  high  punctuality  a 
year  or  two  later;  and  the  interesting  question,  an  oc- 
casion really  for  the  moralist,  was  by  that  time  not  to 
recognise  in  it  the  mere  triumph  of  a  mechanical  art, 
a  "receipt"  applied  with  the  skill  of  long  practice,  but 
to  do  much  more  than  this — that  is  really  to  give  a 
name  to  the  particular  shade  of  blindness  that  could 
constitute  a  trap  for  so  great  an  artistic  intelligence. 
The  presumptuous  volume,  without  sweetness,  without 
antecedents,  superficial  and  violent,  has  the  minimum 
instead  of  the  maximum  of  value;  so  that  it  betrayed 
or  "gave  away"  just  in  this  degree  the  state  of  mind 
on  the  author's  part  responsible  for  its  inflated  hollow- 
ness.  To  put  one's  finger  on  the  state  of  mind  was  to 
find  out  accordingly  what  was,  as  we  say,  the  matter 
with  him. 

It  seemed  to  me,  I  remember,  that  I  found  out  as 
never  before  when,  in  its  turn,  "Fecondite"  began  the 


£MILE  ZOLA  49 

work  of  crowning  the  edifice.  "Fecondite"  is  physio- 
logical, whereas  "Rome"  is  not,  whereas  "Verite" 
likewise  is  not;  yet  these  three  productions  joined  hands 
at  a  given  moment/to  fit  into  the  lock  of  the  mystery 
the  key  of  my  meditation.^  They  came  to  the  same 
thing,  to  the  extent  of  permitting  me  to  read  into  them 
together  the  same  precious  lesson.  This  lesson  may 
not,  barely  stated,  sound  remarkable;  yet  without 
being  in  possession  of  it  I  should  have  ventured  on 
none  of  these  remarks.  "The  matter  with"  Zola  then, 
so  far  as  it  goes,  was  that,  as  the  imagination  of  the 
artist  is  in  the  best  cases  not  only  clarified  but  intensi- 
fied by  his  equal  possession  of  Taste  (deserving  here  if 
ever  the  old-fashioned  honour  of  a  capital)  so  when  he 
has  lucklessly  never  inherited  that  auxiliary  blessing 
the  imagination  itself  inevitably  breaks  down  as  a 
consequence.  There  is  simply  no  limit,  in  fine,  to  the 
misfortune  of  being  tasteless;  it  does  not  merely  dis- 
figure the  surface  and  the  fringe  of  your  performance 
— it  eats  back  into  the  very  heart  and  enfeebles  the 
sources  of  life.  When  you  have  no  taste  you  have  no  ' 
discretion,  which  is  the  conscience  of  taste,  and  when 
you  have  no  discretion  you  perpetrate  books  like 
"  Rome,"  which  are  without  intellectual  modesty,  books 
like  "Fecondite,"  which  are  without  a  sense  of  the 
ridiculous,  books  like  "Verite,"  which  are  without  the 
finer  vision  of  human  experience. 

It  is  marked  that  in  each  of  these  examples  the  de- 
ficiency has  been  directly  fatal.  No  stranger  doom 
was  ever  appointed  for  a  man  so  plainly  desiring  only 
to  be  just  than  the  absurdity  of  not  resting  till  he  had 
buried  the  felicity  of  his  past,  such  as  it  was,  under  a 
great  flat  leaden  slab.  "Verite"  is  a  plea  for  science, 


50  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

as  science,  to  Zola,  is  all  truth,  the  mention  of  any 
other  kind  being  mere  imbecility;  and  the  simplifica- 
tion of  the  human  picture  to  which  his  negations  and 
exasperations  have  here  conducted  him  was  not,  even 
when  all  had  been  said,  credible  in  advance.  The  re- 
sult is  amazing  when  we  consider  that  the  finer  ob- 
servation is  the  supposed  basis  of  all  such  work.  It  is 
not  that  even  here  the  author  has  not  a  queer  idealism 
of  his  own;  this  idealism  is  on  the  contrary  so  present 
as  to  show  positively  for  the  falsest  of  his  simplifica- 
tions. In  "Fecondite"  it  becomes  grotesque,  makes 
of  the  book  the  most  muscular  mistake  of  sense  probably 
ever  committed.  Where  was  the  judgment  of  which 
experience  is  supposed  to  be  the  guarantee  when  the 
perpetrator  could  persuade  himself  that  the  lesson  he 
wished  in  these  pages  to  convey  could  be  made  im- 
mediate and  direct,  chalked,  with  loud  taps  and  a  still 
louder  commentary,  the  sexes  and  generations  all  con- 
voked, on  the  blackboard  of  the  "family  sentiment  ?" 

I  have  mentioned,  however,  all  this  time  but  one  of 
his  categories.  The  second  consists  of  such  things  as 
"La  Fortune  des  Rougon"  and  "La  Curee,"  as  "Eu- 
gene Rougon"  and  even  "Nana,"  as  "Pot-Bouille,"  as 
"L'CEuvre"  and  "La  Joie  de  Vivre."  These  volumes 
may  rank  as  social  pictures  in  the  narrowest  sense, 
studies,  comprehensively  speaking,  of  the  manners,  the 
morals,  the  miseries — for  it  mainly  comes  to  that — of 
a  bourgeoisie  grossly  materialised.  They  deal  with  the 
life  of  individuals  in  the  liberal  professions  and  with 
that  of  political  and  social  adventures,  and  offer  the 
personal  character  and  career,  more  or  less  detached, 
as  the  centre  of  interest.  "La  Curee"  is  an  evocation, 
violent  and  "romantic,"  of  the  extravagant  appetites, 


£MILE  ZOLA  51 

the  fever  of  the  senses,  supposedly  fostered,  for  its 
ruin,  by  the  hapless  second  Empire,  upon  which  general 
ills  and  turpitudes  at  large  were  at  one  time  so  freely 
and  conveniently  fathered.  "Eugene  Rougon"  carries 
out  this  view  in  the  high  colour  of  a  political  portrait, 
not  other  than  scandalous,  for  which  one  of  the  minis- 
terial antes  damnees  of  Napoleon  III.,  M.  Rouher,  is 
reputed,  I  know  not  how  justly,  to  have  sat.  "Nana," 
attaching  itself  by  a  hundred  strings  to  a  prearranged 
table  of  kinships,  heredities,  transmissions,  is  the  vast 
crowded  epos  of  the  daughter  of  the  people  filled  with 
poisoned  blood  and  sacrificed  as  well  as  sacrificing  on 
the  altar  of  luxury  and  lust;  the  panorama  of  such  a 
"progress"  as  Hogarth  would  more  definitely  have 
named  —  the  progress  across  the  high  plateau  of 
"pleasure"  and  down  the  facile  descent  on  the  other 
side.  "Nana"  is  truly  a  monument  to  Zola's  patience; 
the  subject  being  so  ungrateful,  so  formidably  spe- 
cial, that  the  multiplication  of  illustrative  detail,  the 
plunge  into  pestilent  depths,  represents  a  kind  of  tech- 
nical intrepidity. 

There  are  other  plunges,  into  different  sorts  of  dark- 
ness; of  which  the  esthetic,  even  the  scientific,  even  the 
ironic  motive  fairly  escapes  us — explorations  of  stag- 
nant pools  like  that  of  "La  Joie  de  Vivre,"  as  to  which, 
granting  the  nature  of  the  curiosity  and  the  substance 
laboured  in,  the  patience  is  again  prodigious,  but 
which  make  us  wonder  what  pearl  of  philosophy,  of 
suggestion  or  just  of  homely  recognition,  the  general 
picture,  as  of  rats  dying  in  a  hole,  has  to  offer.  Our 
various  senses,  sight,  smell,  sound,  touch,  are,  as  with 
Zola  always,  more  or  less  convinced;  but  when  the 
particular  effect  upon  each  of  these  is  added  to  the 


52  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

effect  upon  the  others  the  mind  still  remains  bewil- 
deredly  unconscious  of  any  use  for  the  total.  I  am  not 
sure  indeed  that  the  case  is  in  this  respect  better  with 
the  productions  of  the  third  order — "La  Faute  de 
1'Abbe  Mouret,"  "Une  Page  d'Amour,"  "Le  Reve," 
"Le  Docteur  Pascal" — in  which  the  appeal  is  more 
directly,  is  in  fact  quite  earnestly,  to  the  moral  vision; 
so  much,  on  such  ground,  was  to  depend  precisely  on 
those  discriminations  in  which  the  writer  is  least  at 
home.  The  volumes  whose  names  I  have  just  quoted 
are  his  express  tribute  to  the  "ideal,"  to  the  select 
and  the  charming — fair  fruits  of  invention  intended  to 
remove  from  the  mouth  so  far  as  possible  the  bitter- 
ness of  the  ugly  things  in  which  so  much  of  the  rest 
of  his  work  had  been  condemned  to  consist.  The  sub- 
jects in  question  then  are  "idyllic"  and  the  treatment 
poetic,  concerned  essentially  to  please  on  the  largest 
lines  and  involving  at  every  turn  that  salutary  need. 
They  are  matters  of  conscious  delicacy,  and  nothing 
might  interest  us  more  than  to  see  what,  in  the  shock 
of  the  potent  forces  enlisted,  becomes  of  this  shy  ele- 
ment. Nothing  might  interest  us  more,  literally,  and 
might  positively  affect  us  more,  even  very  nearly  to 
tears,  though  indeed  sometimes  also  to  smiles,  than  to 
see  the  constructor  of  Les  Rougon-Macquart  trying, 
"for  all  he  is  worth,"  to  be  fine  with  fineness,  finely 
tender,  finely  true — trying  to  be,  as  it  is  called,  dis- 
tinguished— in  face  of  constitutional  hindrance. 

The  effort  is  admirably  honest,  the  tug  at  his  subject 
splendidly  strong;  but  the  consequences  remain  of  the 
strangest,  and  we  get  the  impression  that — as  repre- 
senting discriminations  unattainable — they  are  some- 
how the  price  he  paid.  "Le  Docteur  Pascal,"  for 


SMILE  ZOLA  53 

instance,  which  winds  up  the  long  chronicle  on  the 
romantic  note,  on  the  note  of  invoked  beauty,  in  order 
to  sweeten,  as  it  were,  the  total  draught — "Le  Docteur 
Pascal,"  treating  of  the  erotic  ardour  entertained  for 
each  other  by  an  uncle  and  his  niece,  leaves  us  amazed 
at  such  a  conception  of  beauty,  such  an  application  of 
romance,  such  an  estimate  of  sweetness,  a  sacrifice  to 
poetry  and  passion  so  little  in  order.  Of  course,  we 
definitely  remind  ourselves,  the  whole  long  chronicle 
is  explicitly  a  scheme,  solidly  set  up  and  intricately 
worked  out,  lighted,  according  to  the  author's  preten- 
sion, by  "science,"  high,  dry  and  clear,  and  with  each 
part  involved  and  necessitated  in  all  the  other  parts, 
each  block  of  the  edifice,  each  "morceau  de  vie," 
physiologically  determined  by  previous  combinations. 
"How  can  I  help  it,"  we  hear  the  builder  of  the  pyra- 
mid ask,  "if  experience  (by  which  alone  I  proceed) 
shows  me  certain  plain  results — if,  holding  up  the  torch 
of  my  famous  'experimental  method,'  I  find  it  stare  me 
in  the  face  that  the  union  of  certain  types,  the  conflux 
of  certain  strains  of  blood,  the  intermarriage,  in  a 
word,  of  certain  families,  produces  nervous  conditions, 
conditions  temperamental,  psychical  and  pathological, 
in  which  nieces  have  to  fall  in  love  with  uncles  and 
uncles  with  nieces  ?  Observation  and  imagination, 
for  any  picture  of  life,"  he  as  audibly  adds,  "know  no 
light  but  science,  and  are  false  to  all  intellectual  de- 
cency, false  to  their  own  honour,  when  they  fear  it, 
dodge  it,  darken  it.  To  pretend  to  any  other  guide 
or  law  is  mere  base  humbug." 

That  is  very  well,  and  the  value,  in  a  hundred  ways, 
of  a  mass  of  production  conceived  in  such  a  spirit  can 
never  (when  robust  execution  has  followed)  be  small. 


54  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

But  the  formula  really  sees  us  no  further.  It  offers  a 
definition  which  is  no  definition.  "Science"  is  soon 
said — the  whole  thing  depends  on  the  ground  so 
covered.  Science  accepts  surely  all  our  consciousness 
of  life;  even,  rather,  the  latter  closes  maternally  round 
it — so  that,  becoming  thus  a  force  within  us,  not  a 
force  outside,  it  exists,  it  illuminates  only  as  we  apply 
it.  We  do  emphatically  apply  it  in  art.  But  Zola 
would  apparently  hold  that  it  much  more  applies  us. 
On  the  showing  of  many  of  his  volumes  then  it  makes 
but  a  dim  use  of  us,  and  this  we  should  still  consider 
the  case  even  were  we  sure  that  the  article  offered  us 
in  the  majestic  name  is  absolutely  at  one  with  its  own 
pretension.  This  confidence  we  can  on  too  many 
grounds  never  have.  The  matter  is  one  of  apprecia- 
tion, and  when  an  artist  answers  for  science  who 
answers  for  the  artist — who  at  the  least  answers  for 
art  ?  Thus  it  is  with  the  mistakes  that  affect  us,  I 
say,  as  Zola's  penalties.  We  are  reminded  by  them 
that  the  game  of  art  has,  as  the  phrase  is,  to  be  played. 
It  may  not  with  any  sure  felicity  for  the  result  be  both 
taken  and  left.  If  you  insist  on  the  common  you  must 
submit  to  the  common;  if  you  discriminate,  on  the 
contrary,  you  must,  however  invidious  your  discrimina- 
tions may  be  called,  trust  to  them  to  see  you  through. 

To  the  common  then  Zola,  often  with  splendid  re- 
sults, inordinately  sacrifices,  and  this  fact  of  its  over- 
whelming him  is  what  I  have  called  his  paying  for  it. 
In  "L'Assommoir,"  in  "Germinal,"  in  "La  Debacle," 
productions  in  which  he  must  most  survive,  the  sac- 
rifice is  ordered  and  fruitful,  for  the  subject  and 
the  treatment  harmonise  and  work  together.  He  de- 
scribes what  he  best  feels,  and  feels  it  more  and  more 


£MILE  ZOLA  55 

as  it  naturally  comes  to  him — quite,  if  I  may  allow 
myself  the  image,  as  we  zoologically  see  some  mighty 
animal,  a  beast  of  a  corrugated  hide  and  a  portentous 
snout,  soaking  with  joy  in  the  warm  ooze  of  an  African 
riverside.  In  these  cases  everything  matches,  and 
"science,"  we  may  be  permitted  to  believe,  has  had 
little  hand  in  the  business.  The  author's  perceptions 
go  straight,  and  the  subject,  grateful  and  responsive, 
gives  itself  wholly  up.  It  is  no  longer  a  case  of  an  un- 
certain smoky  torch,  but  of  a  personal  vision,  the 
vision  of  genius,  springing  from  an  inward  source.  Of 
this  genius  "L'Assommoir"  is  the  most  extraordinary 
record.  It  contains,  with  the  two  companions  I  have 
given  it,  all  the  best  of  Zola,  and  the  three  books  to- 
gether are  solid  ground — or  would  be  could  I  now  so 
take  them — for  a  study  of  the  particulars  of  his  power. 
His  strongest  marks  and  features  abound  in  them; 
"L'Assommoir"  above  all  is  (not  least  in  respect  to 
its  bold  free  linguistic  reach,  already  glanced  at)  com- 
pletely genial,  while  his  misadventures,  his  unequipped 
and  delusive  pursuit  of  the  life  of  the  spirit  and  the 
tone  of  culture,  are  almost  completely  absent. 

It  is  a  singular  sight  enough  this  of  a  producer  of  il- 
lusions whose  interest  for  us  is  so  independent  of  our 
pleasure  or  at  least  of  our  complacency — who  touches 
us  deeply  even  while  he  most  "puts  us  off,"  who  makes 
us  care  for  his  ugliness  and  yet  himself  at  the  same 
time  pitilessly  (pitilessly,  that  is,  for  us)  makes  a  mock 
of  it,  who  fills  us  with  a  sense  of  the  rich  which  is  none 
the  less  never  the  rare.  Gervaise,  the  most  immedi- 
ately "felt,"  I  cannot  but  think,  of  all  his  characters, 
is  a  lame  washerwoman,  loose  and  gluttonous,  without 
will,  without  any  principle  of  cohesion,  the  sport  of 


56  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

every  wind  that  assaults  her  exposed  life,  and  who, 
rolling  from  one  gross  mistake  to  another,  finds  her 
end  in  misery,  drink  and  despair.  But  her  career,  as 
presented,  has  fairly  the  largeness  that,  throughout  the 
chronicle,  we  feel  as  epic,  and  the  intensity  of  her 
creator's  vision  of  it  and  of  the  dense  sordid  life  hanging 
about  it  is  one  of  the  great  things  the  modern  novel 
has  been  able  to  do.  It  has  done  nothing  more  com- 
pletely constitutive  and  of  a  tone  so  rich  and  full  and 
sustained.  The  tone  of  "L'Assommoir"  is,  for  mere 
"keeping  up,"  unsurpassable,  a  vast  deep  steady  tide 
on  which  every  object  represented  is  triumphantly 
borne.  It  never  shrinks  nor  flows  thin,  and  nothing 
for  an  instant  drops,  dips  or  catches;  the  high-water 
mark  of  sincerity,  of  the  genial,  as  I  have  called  it,  is 
unfailingly  kept. 

For  the  artist  in  the  same  general  "line"  such  a  pro- 
duction has  an  interest  almost  inexpressible,  a  mystery 
as  to  origin  and  growth  over  which  he  fondly  but  rather 
vainly  bends.  How  after  all  does  it  so  get  itself  done  ? 
— the  "done"  being  admirably  the  sign  and  crown  of 
it.  The  light  of  the  richer  mind  has  been  elsewhere, 
as  I  have  sufficiently  hinted,  frequent  enough,  but 
nothing  truly  in  all  fiction  was  ever  built  so  strong  or 
made  so  dense  as  here.  Needless  to  say  there  are  a 
thousand  things  with  more  charm  in  their  truth,  with 
more  beguilement  of  every  sort,  more  prettiness  of 
pathos,  more  innocence  of  drollery,  for  the  spectator's 
sense  of  truth.  But  I  doubt  if  there  has  ever  been  a 
more  totally  represented  world,  anything  more  founded 
and  established,  more  provided  for  all  round,  more 
organised  and  carried  on.  It  is  a  world  practically 
workable,  with  every  part  as  functional  as  every  other, 


£MILE  ZOLA  57 

and  with  the  parts  all  chosen  for  direct  mutual  aid. 
Let  it  not  be  said  either  that  the  equal  constitution 
of  parts  makes  for  repletion  or  excess;  the  air  circulates 
and  the  subject  blooms;  deadness  comes  in  these  mat- 
ters only  when  the  right  parts  are  absent  and  there 
is  vain  beating  of  the  air  in  their  place — the  refuge  of 
the  fumbler  incapable  of  the  thing  "done"  at  all. 

The  mystery  I  speak  of,  for  the  reader  who  reflects 
as  he  goes,  is  the  wonder  of  the  scale  and  energy  of 
Zola's  assimilations.  This  wonder  besets  us  above 
all  throughout  the  three  books  I  have  placed  first. 
How,  all  sedentary  and  "scientific,"  did  he  get  so 
near  ?  By  what  art,  inscrutable,  immeasurable,  in- 
defatigable, did  he  arrange  to  make  of  his  documents, 
in  these  connections,  a  use  so  vivified  ?  Say  he  was 
"near"  the  subject  of  "L'Assommoir"  in  imagina- 
tion, in  more  or  less  familiar  impression,  in  tempera- 
ment and  humour,  he  could  not  after  all  have  been 
near  it  in  personal  experience,  and  the  copious  per- 
sonalism  of  the  picture,  not  to  say  its  frank  animalism, 
yet  remains  its  note  and  its  strength.  When  the  note 
had  been  struck  in  a  thousand  forms  we  had,  by  mul- 
tiplication, as  a  kind  of  cumulative  consequence,  the 
finished  and  rounded  book;  just  as  we  had  the  same 
result  by  the  same  process  in  "Germinal."  It  is  not 
of  course  that  multiplication  and  accumulation,  the 
extraordinary  pair  of  legs  on  which  he  walks,  are 
easily  or  directly  consistent  with  his  projecting  him- 
self morally;  this  immense  diffusion,  with  its  appro- 
priation of  everything  it  meets,  affects  us  on  the  con- 
trary as  perpetually  delaying  access  to  what  we  may 
call  the  private  world,  the  world  of  the  individual. 
Yet  since  the  individual — for  it  so  happens — is  simple 


58  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

and  shallow  our  author's  dealings  with  him,  as  met  and 
measured,  maintain  their  resemblance  to  those  of  the 
lusty  bee  who  succeeds  in  plumping  for  an  instant,  of  a 
summer  morning,  into  every  flower-cup  of  the  garden. 

Grant — and  the  generalisation  may  be  emphatic— 
that  the  shallow  and  the  simple  are  all  the  population 
of  his  richest  and  most  crowded  pictures,  and  that  his 
"psychology,"  in  a  psychologic  age,  remains  thereby 
comparatively  coarse,  grant  this  and  we  but  get  an- 
other view  of  the  miracle.  We  see  enough  of  the 
superficial  among  novelists  at  large,  assuredly,  without 
deriving  from  it,  as  we  derive  from  Zola  at  his  best, 
the  concomitant  impression  of  the  solid.  It  is  in  gen- 
eral— I  mean  among  the  novelists  at  large — the  im- 
pression of  the  cheap,  which  the  author  of  Les  Rougon- 
Macquart,  honest  man,  never  faithless  for  a  moment 
to  his  own  stiff  standard,  manages  to  spare  us  even  in 
the  prolonged  sandstorm  of  "Verite."  The  Common 
is  another  matter;  it  is  one  of  the  forms  of  the  super- 
ficial— pervading  and  consecrating  all  things  in  such  a 
book  as  "Germinal" — and  it  only  adds  to  the  number 
of  our  critical  questions.  How  in  the  world  is  it  made, 
this  deplorable  democratic  malodorous  Common,  so 
strange  and  so  interesting  ?  How  is  it  taught  to  receive 
into  its  loins  the  stufF  of  the  epic  and  still,  in  spite  of 
that  association  with  poetry,  never  depart  from  its 
nature  ?  It  is  in  the  great  lusty  game  he  plays  with 
the  shallow  and  the  simple  that  Zola's  mastery  resides, 
and  we  see  of  course  that  when  values  are  small  it 
takes  innumerable  items  and  combinations  to  make  up 
the  sum.  In  "L'Assommoir"  and  in  "Germinal,"  to 
some  extent  even  in  "La  Debacle,"  the  values  are  all, 
morally,  personally,  of  the  lowest — the  highest  is  poor 


£MILE  ZOLA  59 

Gervaise  herself,  richly  human  in  her  generosities  and 
follies — yet  each  is  as  distinct  as  a  brass-headed  nail. 

What  we  come  back  to  accordingly  is  the  unprece- 
dented case  of  such  a  combination  of  parts.  Painters, 
of  great  schools,  often  of  great  talent,  have  responded 
liberally  on  canvas  to  the  appeal  of  ugly  things,  of 
Spanish  beggars,  squalid  and  dusty-footed,  of  mar- 
tyred saints  or  other  convulsed  sufferers,  tortured  and 
bleeding,  of  boors  and  louts  soaking  a  Dutch  proboscis 
in  perpetual  beer;  but  we  had  never  before  had  to 
reckon  with  so  literary  a  treatment  of  the  mean  and 
vulgar.  When  we  others  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  are 
vulgar  we  are,  handsomely  and  with  the  best  con- 
science in  the  world,  vulgar  all  through,  too  vulgar  to 
be  in  any  degree  literary,  and  too  much  so  therefore 
to  be  critically  reckoned  with  at  all.  The  French  are 
different — they  separate  their  sympathies,  multiply 
their  possibilities,  observe  their  shades,  remain  more 
or  less  outside  of  their  worst  disasters.  They  mostly 
contrive  to  get  the  idea,  in  however  dead  a  faint,  down 
into  the  lifeboat.  They  may  lose  sight  of  the  stars, 
but  they  save  in  some  such  fashion  as  that  their  in- 
tellectual souls.  Zola's  own  reply  to  all  puzzlements 
would  have  been,  at  any  rate,  I  take  it,  a  straight  sum- 
mary of  his  inveterate  professional  habits.  "It  is  all 
very  simple — I  produce,  roughly  speaking,  a  volume  a 
year,  and  of  this  time  some  five  months  go  to  prepara- 
tion, to  special  study.  In  the  other  months,  with  all 
my  cadres  established,  I  write  the  book.  And  I  can 
hardly  say  which  part  of  the  job  is  stiffest." 

The  story  was  not  more  wonderful  for  him  than 
that,  nor  the  job  more  complex;  which  is  why  we  must 


60  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

say  of  his  whole  process  and  its  results  that  they  con- 
stitute together  perhaps  the  most  extraordinary  imita- 
tion of  observation  that  we  possess.  Balzac  appealed 
to  "science"  and  proceeded  by  her  aid;  Balzac  had 
cadres  enough  and  a  tabulated  world,  rubrics,  relation- 
ships and  genealogies;  but  Balzac  affects  us  in  spite  of 
everything  as  personally  overtaken  by  life,  as  fairly 
hunted  and  run  to  earth  by  it.  He  strikes  us  as  strug- 
gling and  all  but  submerged,  as  beating  over  the  scene 
such  a  pair  of  wings  as  were  not  soon  again  to  be  wielded 
by  any  visitor  of  his  general  air  and  as  had  not  at  all 
events  attached  themselves  to  Zola's  rounded  shoulders. 
His  bequest  is  in  consequence  immeasurably  more  in- 
teresting, yet  who  shall  declare  that  his  adventure  was 
in  its  greatness  more  successful  ?  Zola  "pulled  it  off," 
as  we  say,  supremely,  in  that  he  never  but  once  found 
himself  obliged  to  quit,  to  our  vision,  his  magnificent 
treadmill  of  the  pigeonholed  and  documented — the 
region  we  may  qualify  as  that  of  experience  by  imi- 
tation. His  splendid  economy  saw  him  through,  he 
laboured  to  the  end  within  sight  of  his  notes  and  his 
charts. 

The  extraordinary  thing,  however,  is  that  on  the 
single  occasion  when,  publicly — as  his  whole  manifes- 
tation was  public — life  did  swoop  down  on  him,  the 
effect  of  the  visitation  was  quite  perversely  other  than 
might  have  been  looked  for.  His  courage  in  the 
Dreyfus  connection  testified  admirably  to  his  ability 
to  live  for  himself  and  out  of  the  order  of  his  volumes 
— little  indeed  as  living  at  all  might  have  seemed  a 
question  for  one  exposed,  when  his  crisis  was  at  its 
height  and  he  was  found  guilty  of  "insulting"  the 
powers  that  were,  to  be  literally  torn  to  pieces  in  the 


£MILE  ZOLA  61 

precincts  of  the  Palace  of  Justice.  Our  point  is  that 
nothing  was  ever  so  odd  as  that  these  great  moments 
should  appear  to  have  been  wasted,  when  all  was  said, 
for  his  creative  intelligence.  "Verite,"  as  I  have  in- 
timated, the  production  in  which  they  might  most 
have  been  reflected,  is  a  production  unrenewed  and 
unrefreshed  by  them,  spreads  before  us  as  somehow 
flatter  and  greyer,  not  richer  and  more  relieved,  by 
reason  of  them.  They  really  arrived,  I  surmise,  too 
late  in  the  day;  the  imagination  they  might  have  vivi- 
fied was  already  fatigued  and  spent. 

I  must  not  moreover  appear  to  say  that  the  power 
to  evoke  and  present  has  not  even  on  the  dead  level  of 
"Verite"  its  occasional  minor  revenges.  There  are 
passages,  whole  pages,  of  the  old  full-bodied  sort, 
pictures  that  elsewhere  in  the  series  would  in  all  likeli- 
hood have  seemed  abundantly  convincing.  Their  mis- 
fortune is  to  have  been  discounted  by  our  intensified, 
our  finally  fatal  sense  of  the  precede.  Quarrelling  with 
all  conventions,  defiant  of  them  in  general,  Zola  was 
yet  inevitably  to  set  up  his  own  group  of  them — as, 
for  that  matter,  without  a  sufficient  collection,  without 
their  aid  in  simplifying  and  making  possible,  how  could 
he  ever  have  seen  his  big  ship  into  port  ?  Art  wel- 
comes them,  feeds  upon  them  always;  no  sort  of  form 
is  practicable  without  them.  It  is  only  a  question  of 
what  particular  ones  we  use — to  wage  war  on  certain 
others  and  to  arrive  at  particular  forms.  The  con- 
vention of  the  blameless  being,  the  thoroughly  "scien- 
tific" creature  possessed  impeccably  of  all  truth  and 
serving  as  the  mouthpiece  of  it  and  of  the  author's 
highest  complacencies,  this  character  is  for  instance 
a  convention  inveterate  and  indispensable,  without 


62  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

whom  the  "sympathetic"  side  of  the  work  could  never 
have  been  achieved.  Marc  in  "Verite,"  Pierre  Fro- 
ment  in  "Lourdes"  and  in  "Rome,"  the  wondrous 
representatives  of  the  principle  of  reproduction  in 
"Fecondite,"  the  exemplary  painter  of  "L'CEuvre," 
sublime  in  his  modernity  and  paternity,  the  patient 
Jean  Macquart  of  "La  Debacle,"  whose  patience  is  as 
guaranteed  as  the  exactitude  of  a  well-made  watch, 
the  supremely  enlightened  Docteur  Pascal  even,  as  I 
recall  him,  all  amorous  nepotism  but  all  virtue  too  and 
all  beauty  of  life — such  figures  show  us  the  reasonable 
and  the  good  not  merely  in  the  white  light  of  the  old 
George  Sand  novel  and  its  improved  moralities,  but 
almost  in  that  of  our  childhood's  nursery  and  school- 
room, that  of  the  moral  tale  of  Miss  Edgeworth  and 
Mr.  Thomas  Day. 

Yet  let  not  these  restrictions  be  my  last  word.  I 
had  intended,  under  the  effect  of  a  reperusal  of  "La 
Debacle,"  "Germinal"  and  "L'Assommoir,"  to  make 
no  discriminations  that  should  not  be  in  our  hero's 
favour.  The  long-drawn  incident  of  the  marriage  of 
Gervaise  and  Cadet-Cassis  and  that  of  the  Homeric 
birthday  feast  later  on  in  the  laundress's  workshop, 
each  treated  from  beginning  to  end  and  in  every  item 
of  their  coarse  comedy  and  humanity,  still  show  the 
unprecedented  breadth  by  which  they  originally  made 
us  stare,  still  abound  in  the  particular  kind  and  degree 
of  vividness  that  helped  them,  when  they  appeared, 
to  mark  a  date  in  the  portrayal  of  manners.  Nothing 
had  then  been  so  sustained  and  at  every  moment  of 
its  grotesque  and  pitiful  existence  lived  into  as  the 
nuptial  day  of  the  Coupeau  pair  in  especial,  their 
fantastic  processional  pilgrimage  through  the  streets 


£MILE  ZOLA  63 

of  Paris  in  the  rain,  their  bedraggled  exploration  of  the 
halls  of  the  Louvre  museum,  lost  as  in  the  labyrinth 
of  Crete,  and  their  arrival  at  last,  ravenous  and  ex- 
asperated, at  the  guinguette  where  they  sup  at  so  much 
a  head,  each  paying,  and  where  we  sit  down  with 
them  in  the  grease  and  the  perspiration  and  succumb, 
half  in  sympathy,  half  in  shame,  to  their  monstrous 
pleasantries,  acerbities  and  miseries.  I  have  said 
enough  of  the  mechanical  in  Zola;  here  in  truth  is, 
given  the  elements,  almost  insupportably  the  sense  of 
life.  That  effect  is  equally  in  the  historic  chapter  of 
the  strike  of  the  miners  in  "Germinal,"  another  of 
those  illustrative  episodes,  viewed  as  great  passages 
to  be  "rendered,"  for  which  our  author  established 
altogether  a  new  measure  and  standard  of  handling,  a 
new  energy  and  veracity,  something  since  which  the 
old  trivialities  and  poverties  of  treatment  of  such 
aspects  have  become  incompatible,  for  the  novelist, 
with  either  rudimentary  intelligence  or  rudimentary 
self-respect. 

As  for  "La  Debacle,"  finally,  it  takes  its  place  with 
Tolstoi's  very  much  more  universal  but  very  much  less 
composed  and  condensed  epic  as  an  incomparably 
human  picture  of  war.  I  have  been  re-reading  it,  I 
confess,  with  a  certain  timidity,  the  dread  of  perhaps 
impairing  the  deep  impression  received  at  the  time  of 
its  appearance.  I  recall  the  effect  it  then  produced 
on  me  as  a  really  luxurious  act  of  submission.  It  was 
early  in  the  summer;  I  was  in  an  old  Italian  town;  the 
heat  was  oppressive,  and  one  could  but  recline,  in  the 
lightest  garments,  in  a  great  dim  room  and  give  one's 
self  up.  I  like  to  think  of  the  conditions  and  the 
emotion,  which  melt  for  me  together  into  the  memory 


64  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

I  fear  to  imperil.  I  remember  that  in  the  glow  of  my 
admiration  there  was  not  a  reserve  I  had  ever  made 
that  I  was  not  ready  to  take  back.  As  an  application 
of  the  author's  system  and  his  supreme  faculty,  as  a 
triumph  of  what  these  things  could  do  for  him,  how 
could  such  a  performance  be  surpassed  ?  The  long, 
complex,  horrific,  pathetic  battle,  embraced,  mastered, 
with  every  crash  of  its  squadrons,  every  pulse  of  its 
thunder  and  blood  resolved  for  us,  by  reflection,  by 
communication  from  two  of  the  humblest  and  ob- 
scurest of  the  military  units,  into  immediate  vision  and 
contact,  into  deep  human  thrills  of  terror  and  pity — 
this  bristling  centre  of  the  book  was  such  a  piece  of 
"doing"  (to  come  back  to  our  word)  as  could  only 
shut  our  mouths.  That  doubtless  is  why  a  generous 
critic,  nursing  the  sensation,  may  desire  to  drop  for  a 
farewell  no  term  into  the  other  scale.  That  our  au- 
thor was  clearly  great  at  congruous  subjects — this  may 
well  be  our  conclusion.  If  the  others,  subjects  of  the 
private  and  intimate  order,  gave  him  more  or  less 
inevitably  "away,"  they  yet  left  him  the  great  distinc- 
tion that  the  more  he  could  be  promiscuous  and  col- 
lective, the  more  even  he  could  (to  repeat  my  imputa- 
tion) illustrate  our  large  natural  allowance  of  health, 
heartiness  and  grossness,  the  more  he  could  strike  us 
as  penetrating  and  true.  It  was  a  distinction  not  easy 
to  win  and  that  his  name  is  not  likely  soon  to  lose. 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT 

THE  first  thing  I  find  to-day  and  on  my  very  threshold  l 
to  say  about  Gustave  Flaubert  is  that  he  has  been  re- 
ported on  by  M.  Emile  Faguet  in  the  series  of  Les 
Grands  ficrivains  Francais  with  such  lucidity  as  may 
almost  be  taken  to  warn  off  a  later  critic.  I  desire  to 
pay  at  the  outset  my  tribute  to  M.  Faguet's  exhaus- 
tive study,  which  is  really  in  its  kind  a  model  and  a 
monument.  Never  can  a  critic  have  got  closer  to  a 
subject  of  this  order;  never  can  the  results  of  the  ap- 
proach have  been  more  copious  or  more  interesting; 
never  in  short  can  the  master  of  a  complex  art  have 
been  more  mastered  in  his  turn,  nor  his  art  more  pene- 
trated, by  the  application  of  an  earnest  curiosity. 
That  remark  I  have  it  at  heart  to  make,  so  pre-emi- 
nently has  the  little  volume  I  refer  to  not  left  the 
subject  where  it  found  it.  It  abounds  in  contributive 
light,  and  yet,  I  feel  on  reflection  that  it  scarce  wholly 
dazzles  another  contributor  away.  One  reason  of  this 
is  that,  though  I  enter  into  everything  M.  Faguet  has 
said,  there  are  things — things  perhaps  especially  of 
the  province  of  the  artist,  the  fellow-craftsman  of 
Flaubert — that  I  am  conscious  of  his  not  having  said; 
another  is  that  inevitably  there  are  particular  possibil- 
ities of  reaction  in  our  English-speaking  consciousness 
that  hold  up  a  light  of  their  own.  Therefore  I  venture 

1  On  the  occasion  of  these  prefatory  remarks  to  a  translation  of  "Madame 
Bovary,"  appearing  in  A  Century  of  French  Romance,  under  the  auspices 
of  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse  and  Mr.  William  Heinemann,  in  1902. 

65 


66  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  follow  even  on  a  field  so  laboured,  only  paying  this 
toll  to  the  latest  and  best  work  because  the  author  has 
made  it  impossible  to  do  less. 

Flaubert's  life  is  so  almost  exclusively  the  story  of 
his  literary  application  that  to  speak  of  his  five  or  six 
fictions  is  pretty  well  to  account  for  it  all.  He  died 
in  1880  after  a  career  of  fifty-nine  years  singularly 
little  marked  by  changes  of  scene,  of  fortune,  of  at- 
titude, of  occupation,  of  character,  and  above  all,  as 
may  be  said,  of  mind.  He  would  be  interesting  to  the 
race  of  novelists  if  only  because,  quite  apart  from  the 
value  of  his  work,  he  so  personally  gives  us  the  example 
and  the  image,  so  presents  the  intellectual  case.  He 
was  born  a  novelist,  grew  up,  lived,  died  a  novelist, 
breathing,  feeling,  thinking,  speaking,  performing 
every  operation  of  life,  only  as  that  votary;  and  this 
though  his  production  was  to  be  small  in  amount  and 
though  it  constituted  all  his  diligence.  It  was  not 
indeed  perhaps  primarily  so  much  that  he  was  born 
and  lived  a  novelist  as  that  he  was  born  and  lived 
literary,  and  that  to  be  literary  represented  for  him 
an  almost  overwhelming  situation.  No  life  was  long 
enough,  no  courage  great  enough,  no  fortune  kind 
enough  to  support  a  man  undei  the  burden  of  this 
character  when  once  such  a  doom  had  been  laid  on 
him.  His  case  was  a  doom  because  he  felt  of  his  voca- 
tion almost  nothing  but  the  difficulty.  He  had  many 
strange  sides,  but  this  was  the  strangest,  that  if  we 
argued  from  his  difficulty  to  his  work,  the  difficulty 
being  registered  for  us  in  his  letters  and  elsewhere,  we 
should  expect  from  the  result  but  the  smallest  things. 
We  should  be  prepared  to  find  in  it  well-nigh  a  complete 
absence  of  the  signs  of  a  gift.  We  should  regret  that 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  67 

the  unhappy  man  had  not  addressed  himself  to  some- 
thing he  might  have  found  at  least  comparatively  easy. 
We  should  singularly  miss  the  consecration  sup- 
posedly given  to  a  work  of  art  by  its  having  been  con- 
ceived in  joy.  That  is  Flaubert's  remarkable,  his  so 
far  as  I  know  unmatched  distinction,  that  he  has  left 
works  of  an  extraordinary  art  even  the  conception  of 
which  failed  to  help  him  to  think  in  serenity.  The 
chapter  of  execution,  from  the  moment  execution  gets 
really  into  the  shafts,  is  of  course  always  and  every- 
where a  troubled  one — about  which  moreover  too  much 
has  of  late  been  written;  but  we  frequently  find  Flau- 
bert cursing  his  subjects  themselves,  wishing  he  had 
not  chosen  them,  holding  himself  up  to  derision  for 
having  done  so,  and  hating  them  in  the  very  act  of 
sitting  down  to  them.  He  cared  immensely  for  the 
medium,  the  task  and  the  triumph  involved,  but  was 
himself  the  last  to  be  able  to  say  why.  He  is  sustained 
only  by  the  rage  and  the  habit  of  effort;  the  mere  love 
of  letters,  let  alone  the  love  of  life,  appears  at  an  early 
age  to  have  deserted  him.  Certain  passages  in  his  cor- 
respondence make  us  even  wonder  if  it  be  not  hate 
that  sustains  him  most.  So,  successively,  his  several 
supremely  finished  and  crowned  compositions  came 
into  the  world,  and  we  may  feel  sure  that  none  others 
of  the  kind,  none  that  were  to  have  an  equal  fortune, 
had  sprung  from  such  adversity. 

I  insist  upon  this  because  his  at  once  excited  and 
baffled  passion  gives  the  key  of  his  life  and  determines 
its  outline.  I  must  speak  of  him  at  least  as  I  feel  him 
and  as  in  his  very  latest  years  I  had  the  fortune  occa- 
sionally to  see  him.  I  said  just  now,  practically,  that  he 
is  for  many  of  our  tribe  at  large  the  novelist,  intent  and 


68  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

typical,  and  so,  gathered  together  and  foreshortened, 
simplified  and  fixed,  the  lapse  of  time  seems  to  show 
him.  It  has  made  him  in  his  prolonged  posture  ex- 
traordinarily objective,  made  him  even  resemble  one 
of  his  own  productions,  constituted  him  as  a  subject, 
determined  him  as  a  figure;  the  limit  of  his  range,  and 
above  all  of  his  reach,  is  after  this  fashion,  no  doubt, 
sufficiently  indicated,  and  yet  perhaps  in  the  event 
without  injury  to  his  name.  If  our  consideration  of 
him  cultivates  a  certain  tenderness  on  the  double 
ground  that  he  suffered  supremely  in  the  cause  and 
that  there  is  endlessly  much  to  be  learned  from  him, 
we  remember  at  the  same  time  that,  indirectly,  the 
world  at  large  possesses  him  not  less  than  the  confrere. 
He  has  fed  and  fertilised,  has  filtered  through  others, 
and  so  arrived  at  contact  with  that  public  from  whom 
it  was  his  theory  that  he  was  separated  by  a  deep  and 
impassable  trench,  the  labour  of  his  own  spade.  He  is 
none  the  less  more  interesting,  I  repeat,  as  a  failure 
however  qualified  than  as  a  success  however  explained, 
and  it  is  as  so  viewed  that  the  unity  of  his  career 
attaches  and  admonishes.  Save  in  some  degree  by  a 
condition  of  health  (a  liability  to  epileptic  fits  at 
times  frequent,  but  never  so  frequent  as  to  have  been 
generally  suspected,)  he  was  not  outwardly  hampered 
as  the  tribe  of  men  of  letters  goes — an  anxious  brother- 
hood at  the  best;  yet  the  fewest  possible  things  appear 
to  have  ever  succeeded  in  happening  to  him.  The 
only  son  of  an  eminent  provincial  physician,  he  in- 
herited a  modest  ease  and  no  other  incumbrance  than, 
as  was  the  case  for  Balzac,  an  over-attentive,  an  im- 
portunate mother;  but  freedom  spoke  to  him  from 
behind  a  veil,  and  when  we  have  mentioned  the  few  ap- 
parent facts  of  experience  that  make  up  his  landmarks 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  69 

over  and  beyond  his  interspaced  publications  we  shall 
have  completed  his  biography.  Tall,  strong,  striking, 
he  caused  his  friends  to  admire  in  him  the  elder,  the 
florid  Norman  type,  and  he  seems  himself,  as  a  man  of 
imagination,  to  have  found  some  transmission  of  race 
in  his  stature  and  presence,  his  light-coloured  salient 
eyes  and  long  tawny  moustache. 

The  central  event  of  his  life  was  his  journey  to  the 
East  in  1849  with  M.  Maxime  Du  Camp,  of  which  the 
latter  has  left  in  his  "Impressions  Litteraires"  a  singu- 
larly interesting  and,  as  we  may  perhaps  say,  slightly 
treacherous  report,  and  which  prepared  for  Flaubert 
a  state  of  nostalgia  that  was  not  only  never  to  leave 
him,  but  that  was  to  work  in  him  as  a  motive.  He 
had  during  that  year,  and  just  in  sufficient  quantity, 
his  revelation,  the  particular  appropriate  disclosure  to 
which  the  gods  at  some  moment  treat  the  artist  unless 
they  happen  too  perversely  to  conspire  against  him: 
he  tasted  of  the  knowledge  by  which  he  was  subse- 
quently to  measure  everything,  appeal  from  every- 
thing, find  everything  flat.  Never  probably  was  an 
impression  so  assimilated,  so  positively  transmuted  to 
a  function;  he  lived  on  it  to  the  end  and  we  may  say 
that  in  "Salammbo"  and  "La  Tentation  de  Saint- 
Antoine"  he  almost  died  of  it.  He  made  afterwards 
no  other  journey  of  the  least  importance  save  a  dis- 
gusted excursion  to  the  Rigi-Kaltbad  shortly  before  his 
death.  The  Franco-German  War  was  of  course  to 
him  for  the  time  as  the  valley  of  the  shadow  itself; 
but  this  was  an  ordeal,  unlike  most  of  his  other  ordeals, 
shared  after  all  with  millions.  He  never  married — he 
declared,  toward  the  end,  to  the  most  comprehending 
of  his  confidants,  that  he  had  been  from  the  first 


70  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

"afraid  of  life";  and  the  friendliest  element  of  his 
later  time  was,  we  judge,  that  admirable  comfortable 
commerce,  in  her  fullest  maturity,  with  Madame 
George  Sand,  the  confidant  I  just  referred  to;  which 
has  been  preserved  for  us  in  the  published  correspon- 
dence of  each.  He  had  in  Ivan  Turgenieff  a  friend  al- 
most as  valued;  he  spent  each  year  a  few  months  in 
Paris,  where  (to  mention  everything)  he  had  his 
natural  place,  so  far  as  he  cared  to  take  it,  at  the  small 
literary  court  of  the  Princess  Mathilde;  and,  lastly,  he 
lost  toward  the  close  of  his  life,  by  no  fault  of  his  own, 
a  considerable  part  of  his  modest  fortune.  It  is,  how- 
ever, in  the  long  security,  the  almost  unbroken  soli- 
tude of  Croisset,  near  Rouen,  that  he  mainly  figures 
for  us,  gouging  out  his  successive  books  in  the  wide 
old  room,  of  many  windows,  that,  with  an  intervening 
terrace,  overlooked  the  broad  Seine  and  the  passing 
boats.  This  was  virtually  a  monastic  cell,  closed  to 
echoes  and  accidents;  with  its  stillness  for  long  periods 
scarce  broken  save  by  the  creak  of  the  towing-chain 
of  the  tugs  across  the  water.  When  I  have  added  that 
his  published  letters  offer  a  view,  not  very  refreshing, 
of  his  youthful  entanglement  with  Madame  Louise 
Colet — whom  we  name  because,  apparently  not  a 
shrinking  person,  she  long  ago  practically  named  her- 
self— I  shall  have  catalogued  his  personal  vicissitudes. 
And  I  may  add  further  that  the  connection  with  Ma- 
dame Colet,  such  as  it  was,  rears  its  head  for  us  in 
something  like  a  desert  of  immunity  from  such  compli- 
cations. 

His  complications  were  of  the  spirit,  of  the  literary 
vision,  and  though  he  was  thoroughly  profane  he  was 
yet  essentially  anchoretic.  I  perhaps  miss  a  point, 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  71 

however,  in  not  finally  subjoining  that  he  was  liberally 
accessible  to  his  friends  during  the  months  he  regularly 
spent  in  Paris.  Sensitive,  passionate,  perverse,  not 
less  than  immediately  sociable — for  if  he  detested  his 
collective  contemporaries  this  dropped,  thanks  to  his 
humanising  shyness,  before  the  individual  encounter — 
he  was  in  particular  and  superexcellently  not  banal, 
and  he  attached  men  perhaps  more  than  women,  in- 
spiring a  marked,  a  by  no  means  colourless  shade  of 
respect;  a  respect  not  founded,  as  the  air  of  it  is  apt  to 
be,  on  the  vague  presumption,  but  addressed  almost  in 
especial  to  his  disparities  and  oddities  and  thereby, 
no  doubt,  none  too  different  from  affection.  His  friends 
at  all  events  were  a  rich  and  eager  cenacle,  among  whom 
he  was  on  occasion,  by  his  picturesque  personality,  a 
natural  and  overtopping  centre;  partly  perhaps  be- 
cause he  was  so  much  and  so  familiarly  at  home.  He 
wore,  up  to  any  hour  of  the  afternoon,  that  long,  col- 
loquial dressing-gown,  with  trousers  to  match,  which 
one  has  always  associated  with  literature  in  France — 
the  uniform  really  of  freedom  of  talk.  Freedom  of 
talk  abounded  by  his  winter  fire,  for  the  cenacle  was 
made  up  almost  wholly  of  the  more  finely  distinguished 
among  his  contemporaries;  of  philosophers,  men  of 
letters  and  men  of  affairs  belonging  to  his  own  genera- 
tion and  the  next.  He  had  at  the  time  I  have  in  mind 
a  small  perch,  far  aloft,  at  the  distant,  the  then  almost 
suburban,  end  of  the  Faubourg  Saint-Honore,  where  on 
Sunday  afternoons,  at  the  very  top  of  an  endless  flight 
of  stairs,  were  to  be  encountered  in  a  cloud  of  conversa- 
tion and  smoke  most  of  the  novelists  of  the  general 
Balzac  tradition.  Others  of  a  different  birth  and  com- 
plexion were  markedly  not  of  the  number,  were  not 
even  conceivable  as  present;  none  of  those,  unless  I 


72  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

misremember,  whose  fictions  were  at  that  time  "serial- 
ised" in  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes.  In  spite  of 
Renan  and  Taine  and  two  or  three  more,  the  contrib- 
utor to  the  Revue  would  indeed  at  no  time  have  found 
in  the  circle  in  question  his  foot  on  his  native  heath. 
One  could  recall  if  one  would  two  or  three  vivid  al- 
lusions to  him,  not  of  the  most  quotable,  on  the  lips 
of  the  most  famous  of  "naturalists" — allusions  to  him 
as  represented  for  instance  by  M.  Victor  Cherbuliez 
and  M.  Octave  Feuillet.  The  author  of  these  pages 
recalls  a  concise  qualification  of  this  last  of  his  fellows 
on  the  lips  of  Emile  Zola,  which  that  absorbed  auditor 
had  too  directly,  too  rashly  asked  for;  but  which  is  alas 
not  reproducible  here.  There  was  little  else  but  the 
talk,  which  had  extreme  intensity  and  variety;  almost 
nothing,  as  I  remember,  but  a  painted  and  gilded  idol, 
of  considerable  size,  a  relic  and  a  memento,  on  the 
chimney-piece.  Flaubert  was  huge  and  diffident,  but 
florid  too  and  resonant,  and  my  main  remembrance  is 
of  a  conception  of  courtesy  in  him,  an  accessibility  to 
the  human  relation,  that  only  wanted  to  be  sure  of 
the  way  taken  or  to  take.  The  uncertainties  of  the 
French  for  the  determination  of  intercourse  have  often 
struck  me  as  quite  matching  the  sharpness  of  their 
certainties,  as  we  for  the  most  part  feel  these  latter, 
which  sometimes  in  fact  throw  the  indeterminate  into 
almost  touching  relief.  I  have  thought  of  them  at 
such  times  as  the  people  in  the  world  one  may  have 
to  go  more  of  the  way  to  meet  than  to  meet  any  other, 
and  this,  as  it  were,  through  their  being  seated  and 
embedded,  provided  for  at  home,  in  a  manner  that 
is  all  their  own  and  that  has  bred  them  to  the  positive 
preacceptance  of  interest  on  their  behalf.  We  at  least 
of  the  Anglo-American  race,  more  abroad  in  the  world, 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  73 

perching  everywhere,  so  far  as  grounds  of  intercourse 
are  concerned,  more  vaguely  and  superficially,  as  well 
as  less  intelligently,  are  the  more  ready  by  that  fact 
with  inexpensive  accommodations,  rather  conscious 
that  these  themselves  forbear  from  the  claim  to  fasci- 
nate, and  advancing  with  the  good  nature  that  is  the 
mantle  of  our  obtuseness  to  any  point  whatever  where 
entertainment  may  be  offered  us.  My  recollection  is 
at  any  rate  simplified  by  the  fact  of  the  presence  al- 
most always,  in  the  little  high  room  of  the  Faubourg's 
end,  of  other  persons  and  other  voices.  Flaubert's 
own  voice  is  clearest  to  me  from  the  unefFaced  sense 
of  a  winter  week-day  afternoon  when  I  found  him  by 
exception  alone  and  when  something  led  to  his  reading 
me  aloud,  in  support  of  some  judgment  he  had  thrown 
off,  a  poem  of  Theophile  Gautier's.  He  cited  it  as  an 
example  of  verse  intensely  and  distinctively  French, 
and  French  in  its  melancholy,  which  neither  Goethe 
nor  Heine  nor  Leopardi,  neither  Pushkin  nor  Tenny- 
son nor,  as  he  said,  Byron,  could  at  all  have  matched  in 
kind.  He  converted  me  at  the  moment  to  this  percep- 
tion, alike  by  the  sense  of  the  thing  and  by  his  large 
utterance  of  it;  after  which  it  is  dreadful  to  have  to 
confess  not  only  that  the  poem  was  then  new  to  me, 
but  that,  hunt  as  I  will  in  every  volume  of  its  author, 
I  am  never  able  to  recover  it.  This  is  perhaps  after  all 
happy,  causing  Flaubert's  own  full  tone,  which  was  the 
note  of  the  occasion,  to  linger  the  more  unquenched. 
But  for  the  rhyme  in  fact  I  could  have  believed  him  to 
be  spouting  to  me  something  strange  and  sonorous  of 
his  own.  The  thing  really  rare  would  have  been  to 
hear  him  do  that — hear  him  gueuler,  as  he  liked  to 
call  it.  Verse,  I  felt,  we  had  always  with  us,  and  almost 
any  idiot  of  goodwill  could  give  it  a  value.  The  value 


74  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

of  so  many  a  passage  of  "Salammbo"  and  of  "L'£du- 
cation"  was  on  the  other  hand  exactly  such  as  gained 
when  he  allowed  himself,  as  had  by  the  legend  ever 
been  frequent  dans  I'lntimite,  to  "bellow"  it  to  its 
fullest  effect. 

One  of  the  things  that  make  him  most  exhibitional 
and  most  describable,  so  that  if  we  had  invented  him 
as  an  illustration  or  a  character  we  would  exactly  so 
have  arranged  him,  is  that  he  was  formed  intellectually 
of  two  quite  distinct  compartments,  a  sense  of  the  real 
and  a  sense  of  the  romantic,  and  that  his  production, 
for  our  present  cognisance,  thus  neatly  and  vividly 
divides  itself.  The  divisions  are  as  marked  as  the 
sections  on  the  back  of  a  scarab,  though  their  distinct- 
ness is  undoubtedly  but  the  final  expression  of  much 
inward  strife.  M.  Faguet  indeed,  who  is  admirable  on 
this  question  of  our  author's  duality,  gives  an  account 
of  the  romanticism  that  found  its  way  for  him  into  the 
real  and  of  the  reality  that  found  its  way  into  the 
romantic;  but  he  none  the  less  strikes  us  as  a  curious 
splendid  insect  sustained  on  wings  of  a  different  colora- 
tion, the  right  a  vivid  red,  say,  and  the  left  as  frank  a 
yellow.  This  duality  has  in  its  sharp  operation  placed 
"Madame  Bovary"  and  "L'fiducation"  on  one  side 
together  and  placed  together  on  the  other  "Salammbo" 
and  "La  Tentation."  "  Bouvard  et  Pecuchet"  it  can 
scarce  be  spoken  of,  I  think,  as  having  placed  anywhere 
or  anyhow.  If  it  was  Flaubert's  way  to  find  his  sub- 
ject impossible  there  was  none  he  saw  so  much  in  that 
light  as  this  last-named,  but  also  none  that  he  ap- 
pears to  have  held  so  important  for  that  very  reason 
to  pursue  to  the  bitter  end.  Posterity  agrees  with 
him  about  the  impossibility,  but  rather  takes  upon 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  75 

itself  to  break  with  the  rest  of  the  logic.  We  may  per- 
haps, however,  for  symmetry,  let  "Bouvard  et  Pecu- 
chet"  figure  as  the  tail — if  scarabs  ever  have  tails — of 
our  analogous  insect.  Only  in  that  case  we  should  also 
append  as  the  very  tip  the  small  volume  of  the  "Trois 
Contes,"  preponderantly  of  the  deepest  imaginative 
hue. 

His  imagination  was  great  and  splendid;  in  spite  of 
which,  strangely  enough,  his  masterpiece  is  not  his 
most  imaginative  work.  "Madame  Bovary,"  beyond 
question,  holds  that  first  place,  and  "Madame  Bovary" 
is  concerned  with  the  career  of  a  country  doctor's  wife 
in  a  petty  Norman  town.  The  elements  of  the  pic- 
ture are  of  the  fewest,  the  situation  of  the  heroine 
almost  of  the  meanest,  the  material  for  interest,  con- 
sideiing  the  interest  yielded,  of  the  most  unpromising; 
but  these  facts  only  throw  into  relief  one  of  those  in- 
calculable incidents  that  attend  the  proceedings  of 
genius.  "Madame  Bovary"  was  doomed  by  circum- 
stances and  causes — the  freshness  of  comparative  youth 
and  good  faith  on  the  author's  part  being  perhaps  the 
chief — definitely  to  take  its  position,  even  though  its 
subject  was  fundamentally  a  negation  of  the  remote, 
the  splendid  and  the  strange,  the  stuff  of  his  fondest  and 
most  cultivated  dreams.  It  would  have  seemed  very 
nearly  to  exclude  the  free  play  of  the  imagination, 
and  the  way  this  faculty  on  the  author's  part  never- 
theless presides  is  one  of  those  accidents,  manoeuvres, 
inspirations,  we  hardly  know  what  to  call  them,  by 
which  masterpieces  grow.  He  of  course  knew  more  or 
less  what  he  was  doing  for  his  book  in  making  Emma 
Bovary  a  victim  of  the  imaginative  habit,  but  he  must 
have  been  far  from  designing  or  measuring  the  total 


76  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

effect  which  renders  the  work  so  general,  so  complete 
an  expression  of  himself.  His  separate  idiosyncrasies, 
his  irritated  sensibility  to  the  life  about  him,  with  the 
power  to  catch  it  in  the  fact  and  hold  it  hard,  and  his 
hunger  for  style  and  history  and  poetry,  for  the  rich 
and  the  rare,  great  reverberations,  great  adumbrations, 
are  here  represented  together  as  they  are  not  in  his 
later  writings.  There  is  nothing  of  the  near,  of  the 
directly  observed,  though  there  may  be  much  of  the 
directly  perceived  and  the  minutely  detailed,  either  in 
"Salammbo"  or  in  "Saint-Antoine,"  and  little  enough 
of  the  extravagance  of  illusion  in  that  indefinable  last 
word  of  restrained  evocation  and  cold  execution 
"L'fiducation  Sentimentale."  M.  Faguet  has  of 
course  excellently  noted  this — that  the  fortune  and 
felicity  of  the  book  were  assured  by  the  stroke  that 
made  the  central  figure  an  embodiment  of  helpless 
romanticism.  Flaubert  himself  but  narrowly  escaped 
being  such  an  embodiment  after  all,  and  he  is  thus  able 
to  express  the  romantic  mind  with  extraordinary 
truth.  As  to  the  rest  of  the  matter  he  had  the  luck  of 
having  been  in  possession  from  the  first,  having  begun 
so  early  to  nurse  and  work  up  his  plan  that,  familiar- 
ity and  the  native  air,  the  native  soil,  aiding,  he  had 
finally  made  out  to  the  last  lurking  shade  the  small 
sordid  sunny  dusty  village  picture,  its  emptiness  con- 
stituted and  peopled.  It  is  in  the  background  and  the 
accessories  that  the  real,  the  real  of  his  theme,  abides; 
and  the  romantic,  the  romantic  of  his  theme,  accord- 
ingly occupies  the  front.  Emma  Bovary's  poor  ad- 
ventures are  a  tragedy  for  the  very  reason  that  in  a 
world  unsuspecting,  unassisting,  unconsoling,  she  has 
herself  to  distil  the  rich  and  the  rare.  Ignorant,  un- 
guided,  undiverted,  ridden  by  the  very  nature  and 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  77 

mixture  of  her  consciousness,  she  makes  of  the  business 
an  inordinate  failure,  a  failure  which  in  its  turn  makes 
for  Flaubert  the  most  pointed,  the  most  told  of  anec- 
dotes. 

There  are  many  things  to  say  about  "Madame 
Bovary,"  but  an  old  admirer  of  the  book  would  be  but 
half-hearted — so  far  as  they  represent  reserves  or 
puzzlements — were  he  not  to  note  first  of  all  the  cir- 
cumstances by  which  it  is  most  endeared  to  him.  To 
remember  it  from  far  back  is  to  have  been  present  all 
along  at  a  process  of  singular  interest  to  a  literary 
mind,  a  case  indeed  full  of  comfort  and  cheer.  The 
finest  of  Flaubert's  novels  is  to-day,  on  the  French 
shelf  of  fiction,  one  of  the  first  of  the  classics;  it  has  at- 
tained that  position,  slowly  but  steadily,  before  our 
eyes;  and  we  seem  so  to  follow  the  evolution  of  the  fate 
of  a  classic.  We  see  how  the  thing  takes  place;  which 
we  rarely  can,  for  we  mostly  miss  either  the  beginning 
or  the  end,  especially  in  the  case  of  a  consecration  as 
complete  as  this.  The  consecrations  of  the  past  are 
too  far  behind  and  those  of  the  future  too  far  in  front. 
That  the  production  before  us  should  have  come  in  for 
the  heavenly  crown  may  be  a  fact  to  offer  English  and 
American  readers  a  mystifying  side;  but  it  is  exactly 
our  ground  and  a  part  moreover  of  the  total  interest. 
The  author  of  these  remarks  remembers,  as  with  a 
sense  of  the  way  such  things  happen,  that  when  a  very 
young  person  in  Paris  he  took  up  from  the  parental 
table  the  latest  number  of  the  periodical  in  which 
Flaubert's  then  duly  unrecognised  masterpiece  was  in 
course  of  publication.  The  moment  is  not  historic, 
but  it  was  to  become  in  the  light  of  history,  as  may  be 
said,  so  unforgettable  that  every  small  feature  of  it 


78  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

yet  again  lives  for  him:  it  rests  there  like  the  backward 
end  of  the  span.  The  cover  of  the  old  Revue  de  Paris 
was  yellow,  if  I  mistake  not,  like  that  of  the  new,  and 
"Madame  Bovary:  Moeurs  de  Province,"  on  the  in- 
side of  it,  was  already,  on  the  spot,  as  a  title,  mysteri- 
ously arresting,  inscrutably  charged.  I  was  ignorant 
of  what  had  preceded  and  was  not  to  know  till  much 
later  what  followed;  but  present  to  me  still  is  the  act 
of  standing  there  before  the  fire,  my  back  against  the 
low  beplushed  and  begarnished  French  chimney-piece 
and  taking  in  what  I  might  of  that  instalment,  taking 
it  in  with  so  surprised  an  interest,  and  perhaps  as  well 
such  a  stir  of  faint  foreknowledge,  that  the  sunny  little 
salon,  the  autumn  day,  the  window  ajar  and  the  cheerful 
outside  clatter  of  the  Rue  Montaigne  are  all  now  for 
me  more  or  less  in  the  story  and  the  story  more  or  less 
in  them.  The  story,  however,  was  at  that  moment 
having  a  difficult  life;  its  fortune  was  all  to  make;  its 
merit  was  so  far  from  suspected  that,  as  Maxime  Du 
Camp — though  verily  with  no  excess  of  contrition — 
relates,  its  cloth  of  gold  barely  escaped  the  editorial 
shears.  This,  with  much  more,  contributes  for  us  to 
the  course  of  things  to  come.  The  book,  on  its  appear- 
ance as  a  volume,  proved  a  shock  to  the  high  pro- 
priety of  the  guardians  of  public  morals  under  the 
second  Empire,  and  Flaubert  was  prosecuted  as  author 
of  a  work  indecent  to  scandal.  The  prosecution  in  the 
event  fell  to  the  ground,  but  I  should  perhaps  have 
mentioned  this  agitation  as  one  of  the  very  few,  of 
any  public  order,  in  his  short  list.  "Le  Candidat" 
fell  at  the  Vaudeville  Theatre,  several  years  later,  with 
a  violence  indicated  by  its  withdrawal  after  a  perform- 
ance of  but  two  nights,  the  first  of  these  marked  by  a 
deafening  uproar;  only  if  the  comedy  was  not  to  re- 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  79 

cover  from  this  accident  the  misprised  lustre  of  the 
novel  was  entirely  to  reassert  itself.  It  is  strange  enough 
at  present — so  far  have  we  travelled  since  then — that 
"Madame  Bovary"  should  in  so  comparatively  recent 
a  past  have  been  to  that  extent  a  cause  of  reprobation; 
and  suggestive  above  all,  in  such  connections,  as  to 
the  large  unconsciousness  of  superior  minds.  The  de- 
sire of  the  superior  mind  of  the  day — that  is  the  govern- 
mental, official,  legal — to  distinguish  a  book  with  such 
a  destiny  before  it  is  a  case  conceivable,  but  concep- 
tion breaks  down  before  its  design  of  making  the  dis- 
tinction purely  invidious.  We  can  imagine  its  knowing 
so  little,  however  face  to  face  with  the  object,  what  it 
had  got  hold  of;  but  for  it  to  have  been  so  urged  on 
by  a  blind  inward  spring  to  publish  to  posterity  the 
extent  of  its  ignorance,  that  would  have  been  beyond 
imagination,  beyond  everything  but  pity. 

And  yet  it  is  not  after  all  that  the  place  the  book  has 
taken  is  so  overwhelmingly  explained  by  its  inherent 
dignity;  for  here  comes  in  the  curiosity  of  the  matter. 
Here  comes  in  especially  its  fund  of  admonition  for 
alien  readers.  The  dignity  of  its  substance  is  the  dig- 
nity of  Madame  Bovary  herself  as  a  vessel  of  experi- 
ence— a  question  as  to  which,  unmistakably,  I  judge, 
we  can  only  depart  from  the  consensus  of  French 
critical  opinion.  M.  Faguet  for  example  commends 
the  character  of  the  heroine  as  one  of  the  most  living 
and  discriminated  figures  of  women  in  all  literature, 
praises  it  as  a  field  for  the  display  of  the  romantic 
spirit  that  leaves  nothing  to  be  desired.  Subject  to  an 
observation  I  shall  presently  make  and  that  bears 
heavily  in  general,  I  think,  on  Flaubert  as  a  painter 
of  life,  subject  to  this  restriction  he  is  right;  which  is  a 


8o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

proof  that  a  work  of  art  may  be  markedly  open  to  ob- 
jection and  at  the  same  time  be  rare  in  its  kind,  and 
that  when  it  is  perfect  to  this  point  nothing  else  par- 
ticularly matters.  "Madame  Bovary"  has  a  perfec- 
tion that  not  only  stamps  it,  but  that  makes  it  stand 
almost  alone;  it  holds  itself  with  such  a  supreme  un- 
approachable assurance  as  both  excites  and  defies 
judgment.  For  it  deals  not  in  the  least,  as  to  unap- 
proachability,  with  things  exalted  or  refined;  it  only 
confers  on  its  sufficiently  vulgar  elements  of  exhibition 
a  final  unsurpassable  form.  The  form  is  in  itself  as 
interesting,  as  active,  as  much  of  the  essence  of  the 
subject  as  the  idea,  and  yet  so  close  is  its  fit  and  so 
inseparable  its  life  that  we  catch  it  at  no  moment  on 
any  errand  of  its  own.  That  verily  is  to  be  interest- 
ing— all  round;  that  is  to  be  genuine  and  whole.  The 
work  is  a  classic  because  the  thing,  such  as  it  is,  is 
ideally  done,  and  because  it  shows  that  in  such  doing 
eternal  beauty  may  dwell.  A  pretty  young  woman 
who  lives,  socially  and  morally  speaking,  in  a  hole,  and 
who  is  ignorant,  foolish,  flimsy,  unhappy,  takes  a  pair 
of  lovers  by  whom  she  is  successively  deserted;  in  the 
midst  of  the  bewilderment  of  which,  giving  up  her 
husband  and  her  child,  letting  everything  go,  she  sinks 
deeper  into  duplicity,  debt,  despair,  and  arrives  on  the 
spot,  on  the  small  scene  itself  of  her  poor  depravities, 
at  a  pitiful  tragic  end.  In  especial  she  does  these  things 
while  remaining  absorbed  in  romantic  intention  and 
vision,  and  she  remains  absorbed  in  romantic  intention 
and  vision  while  fairly  rolling  in  the  dust.  That  is  the 
triumph  of  the  book  as  the  triumph  stands,  that  Emma 
interests  us  by  the  nature  of  her  consciousness  and  the 
play  of  her  mind,  thanks  to  the  reality  and  beauty 
with  which  those  sources  are  invested.  It  is  not  only 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  81 

that  they  represent  her  state;  they  are  so  true,  so 
observed  and  felt,  and  especially  so  shown,  that  they 
represent  the  state,  actual  or  potential,  of  all  persons 
like  her,  persons  romantically  determined.  Then  her 
setting,  the  medium  in  which  she  struggles,  becomes  in 
its  way  as  important,  becomes  eminent  with  the 
eminence  of  art;  the  tiny  world  in  which  she  revolves, 
the  contracted  cage  in  which  she  flutters,  is  hung  out 
in  space  for  her,  and  her  companions  in  captivity  there 
are  as  true  as  herself. 

I  have  said  enough  to  show  what  I  mean  by  Flau- 
bert's having  in  this  picture  expressed  something  of 
his  intimate  self,  given  his  heroine  something  of  his 
own  imagination:  a  point  precisely  that  brings  me  back 
to  the  restriction  at  which  I  just  now  hinted,  in  which 
M.  Faguet  fails  to  indulge  and  yet  which  is  immediate 
for  the  alien  reader.  Our  complaint  is  that  Emma 
Bovary,  in  spite  of  the  nature  of  her  consciousness 
and  in  spite  of  her  reflecting  so  much  that  of  her 
creator,  is  really  too  small  an  affair.  This,  critically 
speaking,  is  in  view  both  of  the  value  and  the  fortune 
of  her  history,  a  wonderful  circumstance.  She  associ- 
ates herself  with  Frederic  Moreau  in  "L'£ducation" 
to  suggest  for  us  a  question  that  can  be  answered,  I 
hold,  only  to  Flaubert's  detriment.  Emma  taken 
alone  would  possibly  not  so  directly  press  it,  but  in 
her  company  the  hero  of  our  author's  second  study  of 
the  "real"  drives  it  home.  Why  did  Flaubert  choose, 
as  special  conduits  of  the  life  he  proposed  to  depict, 
such  inferior  and  in  the  case  of  Frederic  such  abject 
human  specimens  ?  I  insist  only  in  respect  to  the  latter, 
the  perfection  of  Madame  Bovary  scarce  leaving  one 
much  warrant  for  wishing  anything  other.  Even  here, 


82  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

however,  the  general  scale  and  size  of  Emma,  who  is 
small  even  of  her  sort,  should  be  a  warning  to  hyperbole. 
If  I  say  that  in  the  matter  of  Frederic  at  all  events  the 
answer  is  inevitably  detrimental  I  mean  that  it  weighs 
heavily  on  our  author's  general  credit.  He  wished  in 
each  case  to  make  a  picture  of  experience — middling 
experience,  it  is  true — and  of  the  world  close  to  him; 
but  if  he  imagined  nothing  better  for  his  purpose  than 
such  a  heroine  and  such  a  hero,  both  such  limited  re- 
flectors and  registers,  we  are  forced  to  believe  it  to 
have  been  by  a  defect  of  his  mind.  And  that  sign  of 
weakness  remains  even  if  it  be  objected  that  the  images 
in  question  were  addressed  to  his  purpose  better  than 
others  would  have  been:  the  purpose  itself  then  shows 
as  inferior.  "L'Education  Sentimentale"  is  a  strange, 
an  indescribable  work,  about  which  there  would  be 
many  more  things  to  say  than  I  have  space  for,  and 
all  of  them  of  the  deepest  interest.  It  is  moreover,  to 
simplify  my  statement,  very  much  less  satisfying  a 
thing,  less  pleasing  whether  in  its  unity  or  its  variety, 
than  its  specific  predecessor.  But  take  it  as  we  will, 
for  a  success  or  a  failure — M.  Faguet  indeed  ranks  it, 
by  the  measure  of  its  quantity  of  intention,  a  failure, 
and  I  on  the  whole  agree  with  him — the  personage 
offered  us  as  bearing  the  weight  of  the  drama,  and  in 
whom  we  are  invited  to  that  extent  to  interest  ourselves, 
leaves  us  mainly  wondering  what  our  entertainer  could 
have  been  thinking  of.  He  takes  Frederic  Moreau  on 
the  threshold  of  life  and  conducts  him  to  the  extreme 
of  maturity  without  apparently  suspecting  for  a  mo- 
ment either  our  wonder  or  our  protest — "Why,  why 
him?"  Frederic  is  positively  too  poor  for  his  part, 
too  scant  for  his  charge;  and  we  feel  with  a  kind  of 
embarrassment,  certainly  with  a  kind  of  compassion, 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  83 

that  it  is  somehow  the  business  of  a  protagonist  to 
prevent  in  his  designer  an  excessive  waste  of  faith. 
When  I  speak  of  the  faith  in  Emma  Bovary  as  pro- 
portionately wasted  I  reflect  on  M.  Faguet's  judgment 
that  she  is  from  the  point  of  view  of  deep  interest 
richly  or  at  least  roundedly  representative.  Repre- 
sentative of  what  ?  he  makes  us  ask  even  while  grant- 
ing all  the  grounds  of  misery  and  tragedy  involved. 
The  plea  for  her  is  the  plea  made  for  all  the  figures 
that  live  without  evaporation  under  the  painter's  hand 
—that  they  are  not  only  particular  persons  but  types 
of  their  kind,  and  as  valid  in  one  light  as  in  the  other. 
It  is  Emma's  "kind"  that  I  question  for  this  respon- 
sibility, even  if  it  be  inquired  of  me  why  I  then  fail  to 
question  that  of  Charles  Bovary,  in  its  perfection,  or 
that  of  the  inimitable,  the  immortal  Homais.  If  we 
express  Emma's  deficiency  as  the  poverty  of  her  con- 
sciousness for  the  typical  function,  it  is  certainly  not, 
one  must  admit,  that  she  is  surpassed  in  this  respect 
either  by  her  platitudinous  husband  or  by  his  friend 
the  pretentious  apothecary.  The  difference  is  none 
the  less  somehow  in  the  fact  that  they  are  respectively 
studies  but  of  their  character  and  office,  which  function 
in  each  expresses  adequately  all  they  are.  It  may  be, 
I  concede,  because  Emma  is  the  only  woman  in  the 
book  that  she  is  taken  by  M.  Faguet  as  femininely 
typical,  typical  in  the  larger  illustrative  way,  whereas 
the  others  pass  with  him  for  images  specifically  con- 
ditioned. Emma  is  this  same  for  myself,  I  plead;  she 
is  conditioned  to  such  an  excess  of  the  specific,  and  the 
specific  in  her  case  leaves  out  so  many  even  of  the 
commoner  elements  of  conceivable  life  in  a  woman 
when  we  are  invited  to  see  that  life  as  pathetic,  as 
dramatic  agitation,  that  we  challenge  both  the  author's 


84  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

and  the  critic's  scale  of  importances.  The  book  is  a 
picture  of  the  middling  as  much  as  they  like,  but  does 
Emma  attain  even  to  that  ?  Hers  is  a  narrow  middling 
even  for  a  little  imaginative  person  whose  "social" 
significance  is  small.  It  is  greater  on  the  whole  than 
her  capacity  of  consciousness,  taking  this  all  round; 
and  so,  in  a  word,  we  feel  her  less  illustrational  than  she 
might  have  been  not  only  if  the  world  had  offered  her 
more  points  of  contact,  but  if  she  had  had  more  of 
these  to  give  it. 

We  meet  Frederic  first,  we  remain  with  him  long,  as 
a  moyen,  a  provincial  bourgeois  of  the  mid-century, 
educated  and  not  without  fortune,  thereby  with  free- 
dom, in  whom  the  life  of  his  day  reflects  itself.  Yet 
the  life  of  his  day,  on  Flaubert's  showing,  hangs  to- 
gether with  the  poverty  of  Frederic's  own  inward  or 
for  that  matter  outward  life;  so  that,  the  whole  thing 
being,  for  scale,  intention  and  extension,  a  sort  of  epic 
of  the  usual  (with  the  Revolution  of  1848  introduced 
indeed  as  an  episode,)  it  affects  us  as  an  epic  without 
air,  without  wings  to  lift  it;  reminds  us  in  fact  more 
than  anything  else  of  a  huge  balloon,  all  of  silk  pieces 
strongly  sewn  together  and  patiently  blown  up,  but 
that  absolutely  refuses  to  leave  the  ground.  The  dis- 
crimination I  here  make  as  against  our  author  is,  how- 
ever, the  only  one  inevitable  in  a  series  of  remarks  so 
brief.  What  it  really  represents — and  nothing  could 
be  more  curious — is  that  Frederic  enjoys  his  position 
not  only  without  the  aid  of  a  single  "sympathetic" 
character  of  consequence,  but  even  without  the  aid  of 
one  with  whom  we  can  directly  communicate.  Can  we 
communicate  with  the  central  personage  ?  or  would  we 
really  if  we  could  ?  A  hundred  times  no,  and  if  he  him- 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  85 

self  can  communicate  with  the  people  shown  us  as 
surrounding  him  this  only  proves  him  of  their  kind. 
Flaubert  on  his  "real"  side  was  in  truth  an  ironic 
painter,  and  ironic  to  a  tune  that  makes  his  final  ac- 
cepted state,  his  present  literary  dignity  and  "classic" 
peace,  superficially  anomalous.  There  is  an  explana- 
tion to  which  I  shall  immediately  come;  but  I  find  my- 
self feeling  for  a  moment  longer  in  presence  of  "L'£du- 
cation"  how  much  more  interesting  a  writer  may  be 
on  occasion  by  the  given  failure  than  by  the  given 
success.  Successes  pure  and  simple  disconnect  and 
dismiss  him;  failures — though  I  admit  they  must  be 
a  bit  qualified — keep  him  in  touch  and  in  relation. 
Thus  it  is  that  as  the  work  of  a  "grand  ecrivain" 
"L'Education,"  large,  laboured,  immensely  "written," 
with  beautiful  passages  and  a  general  emptiness,  with 
a  kind  of  leak  in  its  stored  sadness,  moreover,  by  which 
its  moral  dignity  escapes — thus  it  is  that  Flaubert's 
ill-starred  novel  is  a  curiosity  for  a  literary  museum. 
Thus  it  is  also  that  it  suggests  a  hundred  reflections, 
and  suggests  perhaps  most  of  them  directly  to  the  in- 
tending labourer  in  the  same  field.  If  in  short,  as  I 
have  said,  Flaubert  is  the  novelist's  novelist,  this  per- 
formance does  more  than  any  other  toward  making 
him  so. 

I  have  to  add  in  the  same  connection  that  I  had  not 
lost  sight  of  Madame  Arnoux,  the  main  ornament  of 
"L'£ducation,"  in  pronouncing  just  above  on  its 
deficiency  in  the  sympathetic.  Madame  Arnoux  is 
exactly  the  author's  one  marked  attempt,  here  or  else- 
where, to  represent  beauty  otherwise  than  for  the 
senses,  beauty  of  character  and  life;  and  what  becomes 
of  the  attempt  is  a  matter  highly  significant.  M. 


86  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Faguet  praises  with  justice  his  conception  of  the  figure 
and  of  the  relation,  the  relation  that  never  bears  fruit, 
that  keeps  Frederic  adoring  her,  through  hindrance  and 
change,  from  the  beginning  of  life  to  the  end;  that 
keeps  her,  by  the  same  constraint,  forever  immacu- 
lately "good,"  from  youth  to  age,  though  deeply 
moved  and  cruelly  tempted  and  sorely  tried.  Her 
contacts  with  her  adorer  are  not  even  frequent,  in  pro- 
portion to  the  field  of  time;  her  conditions  of  fortune, 
of  association  and  occupation  are  almost  sordid,  and 
we  see  them  with  the  march  of  the  drama,  such  as  it 
is,  become  more  and  more  so;  besides  which — I  again 
remember  that  M.  Faguet  excellently  notes  it — nothing 
in  the  nature  of  "parts"  is  attributed  to  her;  not  only 
is  she  not  presented  as  clever,  she  is  scarce  invested 
with  a  character  at  all.  Almost  nothing  that  she  says 
is  repeated,  almost  nothing  that  she  does  is  shown. 
She  is  an  image  none  the  less  beautiful  and  vague,  an 
image  of  passion  cherished  and  abjured,  renouncing 
all  sustenance  and  yet  persisting  in  life.  Only  she  has 
for  real  distinction  the  extreme  drawback  that  she  is 
offered  us  quite  preponderantly  through  Frederic's 
vision  of  her,  that  we  see  her  practically  in  no  other 
light.  Now  Flaubert  unfortunately  has  not  been  able 
not  so  to  discredit  Frederic's  vision  in  general,  his 
vision  of  everyone  and  everything,  and  in  particular  of 
his  own  life,  that  it  makes  a  medium  good  enough  to 
convey  adequately  a  noble  impression.  Madame  Ar- 
noux  is  of  course  ever  so  much  the  best  thing  in  his 
life — which  is  saying  little;  but  his  life  is  made  up  of 
such  queer  material  that  we  find  ourselves  displeased 
at  her  being  "in"  it  on  whatever  terms;  all  the  more 
that  she  seems  scarcely  to  affect,  improve  or  deter- 
mine it.  Her  creator  in  short  never  had  a  more  awk- 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  87 

ward  idea  than  this  attempt  to  give  us  the  benefit  of 
such  a  conception  in  such  a  way;  and  even  though  I 
have  still  something  else  to  say  about  that  I  may  as 
well  speak  of  it  at  once  as  a  mistake  that  gravely  counts 
against  him.  It  is  but  one  of  three,  no  doubt,  in  all  his 
work;  but  I  shall  not,  I  trust,  pass  for  extravagant  if 
I  call  it  the  most  indicative.  What  makes  it  so  is  its 
being  the  least  superficial;  the  two  others  are,  so  to 
speak,  intellectual,  while  this  is  somehow  moral.  It 
was  a  mistake,  as  I  have  already  hinted,  to  propose 
to  register  in  so  mean  a  consciousness  as  that  of  such 
a  hero  so  large  and  so  mixed  a  quantity  of  lifeas"L'£du- 
cation"  clearly  intends;  and  it  was  a  mistake  of  the 
tragic  sort  that  is  a  theme  mainly  for  silence  to  have 
embarked  on  "Bouvard  et  Pecuchet"  at  all,  not  to 
have  given  it  up  sooner  than  be  given  up  by  it.  But 
these  were  at  the  worst  not  wholly  compromising 
blunders.  What  was  compromising — and  the  great 
point  is  that  it  remained  so,  that  nothing  has  an  equal 
weight  against  it — is  the  unconsciousness  of  error  in 
respect  to  the  opportunity  that  would  have  counted 
as  his  finest.  We  feel  not  so  much  that  Flaubert 
misses  it,  for  that  we  could  bear;  but  that  he  doesn't 
know  he  misses  it  is  what  stamps  the  blunder.  We  do 
not  pretend  to  say  how  he  might  have  shown  us  Ma- 
dame Arnoux  better — that  was  his  own  affair.  What 
is  ours  is  that  he  really  thought  he  was  showing  her 
as  well  as  he  could,  or  as  she  might  be  shown;  at  which 
we  veil  our  face.  For  once  that  he  had  a  conception 
quite  apart,  apart  I  mean  from  the  array  of  his  other 
conceptions  and  more  delicate  than  any,  he  "went," 
as  we  say,  and  spoiled  it.  Let  me  add  in  all  tender- 
ness, and  to  make  up  for  possibly  too  much  insistence, 
that  it  is  the  only  stain  on  his  shield;  let  me  even  con- 


88  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

fess  that  I  should  not  wonder  if,  when  all  is  said,  it  is 
a  blemish  no  one  has  ever  noticed. 

Perhaps  no  one  has  ever  noticed  either  what  was 
present  to  me  just  above  as  the  partial  makeweight 
there  glanced  at,  the  fact  that  in  the  midst  of  this 
general  awkwardness,  as  I  have  called  it,  there  is  at 
the  same  time  a  danger  so  escaped  as  to  entitle  our 
author  to  full  credit.  I  scarce  know  how  to  put  it 
with  little  enough  of  the  ungracious,  but  I  think  that 
even  the  true  Flaubertist  finds  himself  wondering  a 
little  that  some  flaw  of  taste,  some  small  but  unfor- 
tunate lapse  by  the  way,  should  as  a  matter  of  fact 
not  somehow  or  somewhere  have  waited  on  the  dem- 
onstration of  the  platonic  purity  prevailing  between 
this  heroine  and  her  hero — so  far  as  we  do  find  that 
image  projected.  It  is  alike  difficult  to  indicate  with- 
out offence  or  to  ignore  without  unkindness  a  fond 
reader's  apprehension  here  of  a  possibility  of  the  wrong 
touch,  the  just  perceptibly  false  note.  I  would  not 
have  staked  my  life  on  Flaubert's  security  of  instinct 
in  such  a  connection — as  an  absolutely  fine  and  pre- 
determined security;  and  yet  in  the  event  that  felicity 
has  settled,  there  is  not  so  much  as  the  lightest  wrong 
breath  (speaking  of  the  matter  in  this  light  of  tact  and 
taste)  or  the  shade  of  a  crooked  stroke.  One  exclaims 
at  the  end  of  the  question  "Dear  old  Flaubert  after 
all — !"  and  perhaps  so  risks  seeming  to  patronise  for 
fear  of  not  making  a  point.  The  point  made  for  what 
it  is  worth,  at  any  rate,  I  am  the  more  free  to  recover 
the  benefit  of  what  I  mean  by  critical  "tenderness"  in 
our  general  connection — expressing  in  it  as  I  do  our 
general  respect,  and  my  own  particular,  for  our  au- 
thor's method  and  process  and  history,  and  my  sense 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  89 

of  the  luxury  of  such  a  sentiment  at  such  a  vulgar 
literary  time.  It  is  a  respect  positive  and%  settled  and 
the  thing  that  has  most  to  do  with  consecrating  for 
us  that  loyalty  to  him  as  the  novelist  of  the  novelist— 
unlike  as  it  is  even  the  best  feeling  inspired  by  any 
other  member  of  the  craft.  He  may  stand  for  our 
operative  conscience  or  our  vicarious  sacrifice;  ani- 
mated by  a  sense  of  literary  honour,  attached  to  an 
ideal  of  perfection,  incapable  of  lapsing  in  fine  from 
a  self-respect,  that  enable  us  to  sit  at  ease,  to  sur- 
render to  the  age,  to  indulge  in  whatever  comparative 
meannesses  (and  no  meanness  in  art  is  so  mean  as  the 
sneaking  economic,)  we  may  find  most  comfortable  or 
profitable.  May  it  not  in  truth  be  said  that  we  prac- 
tise our  industry,  so  many  of  us,  at  relatively  little 
cost  just  because  poor  Flaubert,  producing  the  most 
expensive  fictions  ever  written,  so  handsomely  paid  for 
it  ?  It  is  as  if  this  put  it  in  our  power  to  produce  cheap 
and  thereby  sell  dear;  as  if,  so  expressing  it,  literary 
honour  being  by  his  example  effectively  secure  for  the 
firm  at  large  and  the  general  concern,  on  its  whole 
esthetic  side,  floated  once  for  all,  we  find  our  individual 
attention  free  for  literary  and  esthetic  indifference. 
All  the  while  we  thus  lavish  our  indifference  the  spirit 
of  the  author  of  "Madame  Bovary,"  in  the  cross-light 
of  the  old  room  above  the  Seine,  is  trying  to  the  last 
admiration  for  the  thing  itself.  That  production  puts 
the  matter  into  a  nutshell:  "Madame  Bovary,"  sub- 
ject to  whatever  qualification,  is  absolutely  the  most 
literary  of  novels,  so  literary  that  it  covers  us  with 
its  mantle.  It  shows  us  once  for  all  that  there  is  no 
intrinsic  call  for  a  debasement  of  the  type.  The  mantle 
I  speak  of  is  wrought  with  surpassing  fineness,  and  we 
may  always,  under  stress  of  whatever  charge  of  illiter- 


90  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

acy,  frivolity,  vulgarity,  flaunt  it  as  the  flag  of  the  guild. 
Let  us  therefore  frankly  concede  that  to  surround 
Flaubert  with  our  consideration  is  the  least  return 
we  can  make  for  such  a  privilege.  The  consideration 
moreover  is  idle  unless  it  be  real,  unless  it  be  intel- 
ligent enough  to  measure  his  effort  and  his  success. 
Of  the  effort  as  mere  effort  I  have  already  spoken,  of 
the  desperate  difficulty  involved  for  him  in  making  his 
form  square  with  his  conception;  and  I  by  no  means 
attach  general  importance  to  these  secrets  of  the  work- 
shop, which  are  but  as  the  contortions  of  the  fastidious 
muse  who  is  the  servant  of  the  oracle.  They  are  really 
rather  secrets  of  the  kitchen  and  contortions  of  the 
priestess  of  that  tripod — they  are  not  an  upstairs 
matter.  It  is  of  their  specially  distinctive  importance 
I  am  now  speaking,  of  the  light  shed  on  them  by  the 
results  before  us. 

They  all  represent  the  pursuit  of  a  style,  of  the 
ideally  right  one  for  its  relations,  and  would  still  be  in- 
teresting if  the  style  had  not  been  achieved.  "  Madame 
Bovary,"  "Salammbo,"  "Saint-Antoine,"  "L'Educa- 
tion"  are  so  written  and  so  composed  (though  the  last- 
named  in  a  minor  degree)  that  the  more  we  look  at 
them  the  more  we  find  in  them,  under  this  head,  a  beauty 
of  intention  and  of  effect;  the  more  they  figure  in  the 
too  often  dreary  desert  of  fictional  prose  a  class  by 
themselves  and  a  little  living  oasis.  So  far  as  that 
desert  is  of  the  complexion  of  our  own  English  speech 
it  supplies  with  remarkable  rarity  this  particular  source 
of  refreshment.  So  strikingly  is  that  the  case,  so  scant 
for  the  most  part  any  dream  of  a  scheme  of  beauty  in 
these  connections,  that  a  critic  betrayed  at  artless  mo- 
ments into  a  plea  for  composition  may  find  himself  as 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  91 

blankly  met  as  if  his  plea  were  for  trigonometry.  He 
makes  inevitably  his  reflections,  which  are  numerous 
enough;  one  of  them  being  that  if  we  turn  our  back  so 
squarely,  so  universally  to  this  order  of  considerations 
it  is  because  the  novel  is  so  preponderantly  cultivated 
among  us  by  women,  in  other  words  by  a  sex  ever 
gracefully,  comfortably,  enviably  unconscious  (it  would 
be  too  much  to  call  them  even  suspicious,)  of  the 
requirements  of  form.  The  case  is  at  any  rate  sharply 
enough  made  for  us,  or  against  us,  by  the  circum- 
stance that  women  are  held  to  have  achieved  on  all 
our  ground,  in  spite  of  this  weakness  and  others,  as 
great  results  as  any.  The  judgment  is  undoubtedly 
founded:  Jane  Austen  was  instinctive  and  charming, 
and  the  other  recognitions — even  over  the  heads  of 
the  ladies,  some  of  them,  from  Fielding  to  Pater — are 
obvious;  without,  however,  in  the  least  touching  my 
contention.  For  signal  examples  of  what  composition, 
distribution,  arrangement  can  do,  of  how  they  intensify 
the  life  of  a  work  of  art,  we  have  to  go  elsewhere;  and 
the  value  of  Flaubert  for  us  is  that  he  admirably 
points  the  moral.  This  is  the  explanation  of  the 
"classic"  fortune  of  "Madame  Bovary"  in  especial, 
though  I  may  add  that  also  of  Herodias  and  Saint- 
Julien  1'Hospitalier  in  the  "Trois  Contes,"  as  well  as 
an  aspect  of  these  works  endlessly  suggestive.  I  spoke 
just  now  of  the  small  field  of  the  picture  in  the  longest 
of  them,  the  small  capacity,  as  I  called  it,  of  the  ves- 
sel; yet  the  way  the  thing  is  done  not  only  triumphs 
over  the  question  of  value  but  in  respect  to  it  fairly 
misleads  and  confounds  us.  Where  else  shall  we  find 
in  anything  proportionately  so  small  such  an  air  of 
dignity  of  size  ?  Flaubert  made  things  big — it  was  his 
way,  his  ambition  and  his  necessity;  and  I  say  this 


92  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

while  remembering  that  in  "L'fiducation"  (in  propor- 
tion I  mean  again,)  the  effect  has  not  been  produced. 
The  subject  of  "L'Education"  is  in  spite  of  Frederic 
large,  but  an  indefinable  shrinkage  has  overtaken  it 
in  the  execution.  The  exception  so  marked,  however, 
is  single;  "Salammbo"  and  "Saint-Antoine"  are  both 
at  once  very  "heavy"  conceptions  and  very  consist- 
ently and  splendidly  high  applications  of  a  manner. 

It  is  in  this  assured  manner  that  the  lesson  sits  aloft, 
that  the  spell  for  the  critical  reader  resides;  and  if 
the  conviction  under  which  Flaubert  labours  is  more 
and  more  grossly  discredited  among  us  his  compact 
mass  is  but  the  greater.  He  regarded  the  work  of  art 
as  existing  but  by  its  expression,  and  defied  us  to  name 
any  other  measure  of  its  life  that  is  not  a  stultification. 
He  held  style  to  be  accordingly  an  indefeasible  part  of 
it,  and  found  beauty,  interest  and  distinction  as  de- 
pendent on  it  for  emergence  as  a  letter  committed  to 
the  post-office  is  dependent  on  an  addressed  envelope. 
Strange  enough  it  may  well  appear  to  us  to  have  to 
apologise  for  such  notions  as  eccentric.  There  are 
persons  who  consider  that  style  comes  of  itself — we  see 
and  hear  at  present,  I  think,  enough  of  them;  and  to 
whom  he  would  doubtless  have  remarked  that  it  goes, 
of  itself,  still  faster.  The  thing  naturally  differs  in 
fact  with  the  nature  of  the  imagination;  the  question 
is  one  of  proprieties  and  affinities,  sympathy  and  pro- 
portion. The  sympathy  of  the  author  of  "Salammbo" 
was  all  with  the  magnificent,  his  imagination  for  the 
phrase  as  variously  noble  or  ignoble  in  itself,  contribu- 
tive  or  destructive,  adapted  and  harmonious  or  casual 
and  common.  The  worse  among  such  possibilities  have 
been  multiplied  by  the  infection  of  bad  writing,  and  he 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  93 

denied  that  the  better  ever  do  anything  so  obliging  as 
to  come  of  themselves.  They  scarcely  indeed  for 
Flaubert  "came"  at  all;  their  arrival  was  determined 
only  by  fasting  and  prayer  or  by  patience  of  pursuit, 
the  arts  of  the  chase,  long  waits  and  watches,  figura- 
tively speaking,  among  the  peaks  or  by  the  waters. 
The  production  of  a  book  was  of  course  made  inor- 
dinately slow  by  the  fatigue  of  these  measures;  in  il- 
lustration of  which  his  letters  often  record  that  it  has 
taken  him  three  days1  to  arrive  at  one  right  sentence, 
tested  by  the  pitch  of  his  ideal  of  the  right  for  the  sug- 
gestion aimed  at.  His  difficulties  drew  from  the  author, 
as  I  have  mentioned,  much  resounding  complaint; 
but  those  voices  have  ceased  to  trouble  us  and  the 
final  voice  remains.  No  feature  of  the  whole  business 
is  more  edifying  than  the  fact  that  he  in  the  first  place 
never  misses  style  and  in  the  second  never  appears 
to  have  beaten  about  for  it.  That  betrayal  is  of  course 
the  worst  betrayal  of  all,  and  I  think  the  way  he  has 
escaped  it  the  happiest  form  of  the  peace  that  has 
finally  visited  him.  It  was  truly  a  wonderful  success 
to  be  so  the  devotee  of  the  phrase  and  yet  never  its 
victim.  Fine  as  he  inveterately  desired  it  should  be 
he  still  never  lost  sight  of  the  question  Fine  for  what  ? 
It  is  always  so  related  and  associated,  so  properly  part 
of  something  else  that  is  in  turn  part  of  something 
other,  part  of  a  reference,  a  tone,  a  passage,  a  page, 

1  It  was  true,  delightfully  true,  that,  extravagance  in  this  province  of  his 
life,  though  apparently  in  no  other,  being  Flaubert's  necessity  and  law,  he 
deliberated  and  hung  fire,  wrestled,  retreated  and  returned,  indulged  gen- 
erally in  a  tragi-comedy  of  waste;  which  I  recall  a  charming  expression  of 
on  the  lips  of  Edmond  de  Goncourt,  who  quite  recognised  the  heroic  legend, 
but  prettily  qualified  it:  "II  faut  vous  dire  qu'il  y  avait  la-dedans  beaucoup 
de  coucheries  et  d'ecole  buissoniere."  And  he  related  how  on  the  oc- 
casion of  a  stay  with  his  friend  under  the  roof  of  the  Princess  Mathilde,  the 
friend,  missed  during  the  middle  hours  of  a  fine  afternoon,  was  found  to 
have  undressed  himself  and  gone  to  bed  to  think ! 


94  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

that  the  simple  may  enjoy  it  for  its  least  bearing  and 
the  initiated  for  its  greatest.  That  surely  is  to  be  a 
writer  of  the  first  order,  to  resemble  when  in  the  hand 
and  however  closely  viewed  a  shapely  crystal  box, 
and  yet  to  be  seen  when  placed  on  the  table  and  opened 
to  contain  innumerable  compartments,  springs  and 
tricks.  One  is  ornamental  either  way,  but  one  is  in 
the  second  way  precious  too. 

The  crystal  box  then  figures  the  style  of  "Salammbo" 
and  "Saint-Antoine"  in  a  greater  degree  than  that  of 
"Bovary,"  because,  as  the  two  former  express  the 
writer's  romantic  side,  he  had  in  them,  while  equally 
covering  his  tracks,  still  further  to  fare  and  still  more 
to  hunt.  Beyond  this  allusion  to  their  completing  his 
duality  I  shall  not  attempt  closely  to  characterise 
them;  though  I  admit  that  in  not  insisting  on  them  I 
press  most  lightly  on  the  scale  into  which  he  had  in  his 
own  view  cast  his  greatest  pressure.  He  lamented  the 
doom  that  drove  him  so  oddly,  so  ruefully,  to  choose 
his  subjects,  but  he  lamented  it  least  when  these  sub- 
jects were  most  pompous  and  most  exotic,  feeling  as 
he  did  that  they  had  then  after  all  most  affinity  with 
his  special  eloquence.  In  dealing  with  the  near,  the 
directly  perceived,  he  had  to  keep  down  his  tone,  to 
make  the  eloquence  small;  though  with  the  consequence, 
as  we  have  seen,  that  in  spite  of  such  precautions  the 
whole  thing  mostly  insists  on  being  ample.  The 
familiar,  that  is,  under  his  touch,  took  on  character, 
importance,  extension,  one  scarce  knows  what  to  call 
it,  in  order  to  carry  the  style  or  perhaps  rather,  as  we 
may  say,  sit  with  proper  ease  in  the  vehicle,  and  there 
was  accordingly  a  limit  to  its  smallness;  whereas  in 
the  romantic  books,  the  preferred  world  of  Flaubert's 


GUSTAVE   FLAUBERT  95 

imagination,  there  was  practically  no  need  of  com- 
promise. The  compromise  gave  him  throughout  end- 
less trouble,  and  nothing  would  be  more  to  the  point 
than  to  show,  had  I  space,  why  in  particular  it  dis- 
tressed him.  It  was  obviously  his  strange  predicament 
that  the  only  spectacle  open  to  him  by  experience  and 
direct  knowledge  was  the  bourgeois,  which  on  that 
ground  imposed  on  him  successively  his  three  so  in- 
tensely bourgeois  themes.  He  was  obliged  to  treat 
these  themes,  which  he  hated,  because  his  experience 
left  him  no  alternative;  his  only  alternative  was  given 
by  history,  geography,  philosophy,  fancy,  the  world  of 
erudition  and  of  imagination,  the  world  especially  of 
this  last.  In  the  bourgeois  sphere  his  ideal  of  expres- 
sion laboured  under  protest;  in  the  other,  the  imagined, 
the  projected,  his  need  for  facts,  for  matter,  and  his 
pursuit  of  them,  sat  no  less  heavily.  But  as  his  style 
all  the  while  required  a  certain  exercise  of  pride  he 
was  on  the  whole  more  at  home  in  the  exotic  than  in 
the  familiar;  he  escaped  above  all  in  the  former  con- 
nection the  associations,  the  disparities  he  detested. 
He  could  be  frankly  noble  in  "Salammbo"  and  "Saint- 
Antoine,"  whereas  in  "Bovary"  and  "L'Education" 
he  could  be  but  circuitously  and  insidiously  so.  He 
could  in  the  one  case  cut  his  coat  according  to  his 
cloth — if  we  mean  by  his  cloth  his  predetermined  tone, 
while  in  the  other  he  had  to  take  it  already  cut.  Sin- 
gular enough  in  his  life  the  situation  so  constituted: 
the  comparatively  meagre  human  consciousness — for 
we  must  come  back  to  that  in  him — struggling  with  the 
absolutely  large  artistic;  and  the  large  artistic  half 
wreaking  itself  on  the  meagre  human  and  half  seeking 
a  refuge  from  it,  as  well  as  a  revenge  against  it,  in  some- 
thing quite  different. 


96  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS. 

Flaubert  had  in  fact  command  of  two  refuges  which 
he  worked  in  turn.  The  first  of  these  was  the  attitude 
of  irony,  so  constant  in  him  that  "L'Education" 
bristles  and  hardens  with  it  and  "Bouvard  et  Pe- 
cuchet" — strangest  of  "poetic"  justices — is  made  as 
dry  as  sand  and  as  heavy  as  lead;  the  second  only  was, 
by  processes,  by  journeys  the  most  expensive,  to  get 
away  altogether.  And  we  inevitably  ask  ourselves 
whether,  eschewing  the  policy  of  flight,  he  might  not 
after  all  have  fought  out  his  case  a  little  more  on  the 
spot.  Might  he  not  have  addressed  himself  to  the 
human  still  otherwise  than  in  "L'£ducation"  and  in 
"Bouvard"  ?  When  one  thinks  of  the  view  of  the  life 
of  his  country,  of  the  vast  French  community  and  its 
constituent  creatures,  offered  in  these  productions,  one 
declines  to  believe  it  could  make  up  the  whole  vision 
of  a  man  of  his  quality.  Or  when  all  was  said  and  done 
was  he  absolutely  and  exclusively  condemned  to  irony  ? 
The  second  lefuge  I  speak  of,  the  getting  away  from 
the  human,  the  congruously  and  measurably  human, 
altogether,  perhaps  becomes  in  the  light  of  this  pos- 
sibility but  an  irony  the  more.  Carthage  and  the 
Thebaid,  Salammbo,  Spendius,  Matho,  Hannon,  Saint 
Anthony,  Hilarion,  the  Paternians,  the  Marcosians 
and  the  Carpocratians,  what  are  all  these,  inviting  be- 
cause queer,  but  a  confession  of  supreme  impatience 
with  the  actual  and  the  near,  often  queer  enough  too, 
no  doubt,  but  not  consolingly,  not  transcendently  ? 
Last  remains  the  question  whether,  even  if  our  author's 
immediate  as  distinguished  from  his  remote  view  had 
had  more  reach,  the  particular  gift  we  claim  for  him, 
the  perfection  of  arrangement  and  form,  would  have 
had  in  certain  directions  the  acquired  flexibility. 
States  of  mind,  states  of  soul,  of  the  simpler  kind,  the 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  97 

kinds  supposable  in  the  Emma  Bovarys,  the  Frederics, 
the  Bouvards  and  the  Pecuchets,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  Carthaginians  and  the  Eremites — for  Flaubert's 
eremites  are  eminently  artless — these  conditions  rep- 
resent, I  think,  his  proved  psychological  range.  And 
that  throws  us  back  remarkably,  almost  confoundingly, 
upon  another  face  of  the  general  anomaly.  The  "gift" 
was  of  the  greatest,  a  force  in  itself,  in  virtue  of  which 
he  is  a  consummate  writer;  and  yet  there  are  whole 
sides  of  life  to  which  it  was  never  addressed  and  which 
it  apparently  quite  failed  to  suspect  as  a  field  of  exer- 
cise. If  he  never  approached  the  complicated  char- 
acter in  man  or  woman — Emma  Bovary  is  not  the  least 
little  bit  complicated — or  the  really  furnished,  the  finely 
civilised,  was  this  because,  surprisingly,  he  could  not  ? 
L'dme  jranqaise  at  all  events  shows  in  him  but  ill. 

This  undoubtedly  marks  a  limit,  but  limits  are  for 
the  critic  familiar  country,  and  he  may  mostly  well 
feel  the  prospect  wide  enough  when  he  finds  something 
positively  well  enough  done.  By  disposition  or  by 
obligation  Flaubert  selected,  and  though  his  selection 
was  in  some  respects  narrow  he  stops  not  too  short 
to  have  left  us  three  really  "cast"  works  and  a  fourth 
of  several  perfect  parts,  to  say  nothing  of  the  element 
of  perfection,  of  the  superlative  for  the  size,  in  his 
three  nouvelles.  What  he  attempted  he  attempted  in 
a  spirit  that  gives  an  extension  to  the  idea  of  the 
achievable  and  the  achieved  in  a  literary  thing,  and 
it  is  by  this  that  we  contentedly  gauge  the  matter. 
As  success  goes  in  this  world  of  the  approximate  it 
may  pass  for  success  of  the  greatest.  If  I  am  unable 
to  pursue  the  proof  of  my  remark  in  "Salammbo"  and 
"Saint-Antoine"  it  is  because  I  have  also  had  to 


98  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

select  and  have  found  the  questions  connected  with 
their  two  companions  more  interesting.  There  are 
numerous  judges,  I  hasten  to  mention,  who,  showing 
the  opposite  preference,  lose  themselves  with  rapture 
in  the  strange  bristling  archaeological  picture — yet  all 
amazingly  vivified  and  co-ordinated — of  the  Cartha- 
ginian mercenaries  in  revolt  and  the  sacred  veil  of  the 
great  goddess  profaned  and  stolen;  as  well  in  the  still 
more  peopled  panorama  of  the  ancient  sects,  super- 
stitions and  mythologies  that  swim  in  the  desert  before 
the  fevered  eyes  of  the  Saint.  One  may  be  able,  how- 
ever, at  once  to  breathe  more  freely  in  "Bovary" 
than  in  "Salammbo"  and  yet  to  hope  that  there  is  no 
intention  of  the  latter  that  one  has  missed.  The 
great  intention  certainly,  and  little  as  we  may  be 
sweetly  beguiled,  holds  us  fast;  which  is  simply  the 
author's  indomitable  purpose  of  fully  pervading  his 
field.  There  are  countries  beyond  the  sea  in  which 
tracts  are  allowed  to  settlers  on  condition  that  they 
will  really,  not  nominally,  cultivate  them.  Flaubert 
is  on  his  romantic  ground  like  one  of  these  settlers;  he 
makes  good  with  all  his  might  his  title  to  his  tract,  and 
in  a  way  that  shows  how  it  is  not  only  for  him  a  ques- 
tion of  safety  but  a  question  of  honour.  Honour  de- 
mands that  he  shall  set  up  his  home  and  his  faith  there 
in  such  a  way  that  every  inch  of  the  surface  be  planted 
or  paved.  He  would  have  been  ashamed  merely  to 
encamp  and,  after  the  fashion  of  most  other  adven- 
turers, knock  up  a  log  hut  among  charred  stumps. 
This  was  not  what  would  have  been  for  him  taking 
artistic  possession,  it  was  not  what  would  have  been 
for  him  even  personal  honour,  let  alone  literary;  and 
yet  the  general  lapse  from  integrity  was  a  thing  that, 
wherever  he  looked,  he  saw  not  only  condoned  but  ac- 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  99 

claimed  and  rewarded.  He  lived,  as  he  felt,  in  an  age 
of  mean  production  and  cheap  criticism,  the  practical 
upshot  of  which  took  on  for  him  a  name  that  was 
often  on  his  lips.  He  called  it  the  hatred  of  literature, 
a  hatred  in  the  midst  of  which,  the  most  literary  of 
men,  he  found  himself  appointed  to  suffer.  I  may  not, 
however,  follow  him  in  that  direction — which  would 
take  us  far;  and  the  less  that  he  was  for  himself  after 
all,  in  spite  of  groans  and  imprecations,  a  man  of  re- 
sources and  remedies,  and  that  there  was  always  his 
possibility  of  building  himself  in. 

This  he  did  equally  in  all  his  books — built  himself 
into  literature  by  means  of  a  material  put  together 
with  extraordinary  art;  but  it  leads  me  again  to  the 
question  of  what  such  a  stiff  ideal  imposed  on  him  for 
the  element  of  exactitude.  This  element,  in  the  ro- 
mantic, was  his  merciless  law;  it  was  perhaps  even  in 
the  romantic  that — if  there  could  indeed  be  degrees 
for  him  in  such  matters — he  most  despised  the  loose 
and  the  more-or-less.  To  be  intensely  definite  and 
perfectly  positive,  to  know  so  well  what  he  meant 
that  he  could  at  every  point  strikingly  and  conclu- 
sively verify  it,  was  the  first  of  his  needs;  and  if  in  ad- 
dition to  being  thus  synthetically  final  he  could  be 
strange  and  sad  and  terrible,  and  leave  the  cause  of 
these  effects  inscrutable,  success  then  had  for  him  its 
highest  savour.  We  feel  the  inscrutability  in  those 
memorable  few  words  that  put  before  us  Frederic 
Moreau's  start  upon  his  vain  course  of  travel,  "II 
connut  alors  la  melancholic  des  paquebots;"  an  image 
to  the  last  degree  comprehensive  and  embracing,  but 
which  haunts  us,  in  its  droll  pathos,  without  our  quite 
knowing  why.  But  he  was  really  never  so  pleased  as 


ioo  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

when  he  could  be  both  rare  and  precise  about  the 
dreadful.  His  own  sense  of  all  this,  as  I  have  already 
indicated,  was  that  beauty  comes  with  expression,  that 
expression  is  creation,  that  it  makes  the  reality,  and 
only  in  the  degree  in  which  it  is,  exquisitely,  expres- 
sion; and  that  we  move  in  literature  through  a  world 
of  different  values  and  relations,  a  blest  world  in  which 
we  know  nothing  except  by  style,  but  in  which  also 
everything  is  saved  by  it,  and  in  which  the  image  is 
thus  always  superior  to  the  thing  itself.  This  quest 
and  multiplication  of  the  image,  the  image  tested  and 
warranted  and  consecrated  for  the  occasion,  was  ac- 
cordingly his  high  elegance,  to  which  he  too  much  sac- 
rificed and  to  which  "Salammbo"  and  partly  "Saint- 
Antoine"  are  monstrous  monuments.  Old  cruelties 
and  perversities,  old  wonders  and  errors  and  terrors, 
endlessly  appealed  to  him;  they  constitute  the  unhuman 
side  of  his  work,  and  if  we  have  not  the  bribe  of  curios- 
ity, of  a  lively  interest  in  method,  or  rather  in  evoca- 
tion just  as  evocation,  we  tread  our  way  among  them, 
especially  in  "Salammbo,"  with  a  reserve  too  dry  for 
our  pleasure.  To  my  own  view  the  curiosity  and  the 
literary  interest  are  equal  in  dealing  with  the  non- 
romantic  books,  and  the  world  presented,  the  aspects 
and  agents,  are  less  deterrent  and  more  amenable 
both  to  our  own  social  and  expressional  terms.  Style 
itself  moreover,  with  all  respect  to  Flaubert,  never 
totally  beguiles;  since  even  when  we  are  so  queerly 
constituted  as  to  be  ninety-nine  parts  literary  we  are 
still  a  hundredth  part  something  else.  This  hundredth 
part  may,  once  we  possess  the  book — or  the  book  pos- 
sesses us — make  us  imperfect  as  readers,  and  yet  without 
it  should  we  want  or  get  the  book  at  all  ?  The  curiosity 
at  any  rate,  to  repeat,  is  even  greatest  for  me  in  "Ma- 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  101 

dame  Bovary, "  say,  for  here  I  can  measure,  can  more 
directly  appreciate,  the  terms.  The  aspects  and  im- 
pressions being  of  an  experience  conceivable  to  me  I 
am  more  touched  by  the  beauty;  my  interest  gets 
more  of  the  benefit  of  the  beauty  even  though  this  be 
not  intrinsically  greater.  Which  brings  back  our  ap- 
preciation inevitably  at  last  to  the  question  of  our 
author's  lucidity. 

I  have  sufficiently  remarked  that  I  speak  from  the 
point  of  view  of  his  interest  to  a  reader  of  his  own  craft, 
the  point  of  view  of  his  extraordinary  technical  wealth 
—though  indeed  when  I  think  of  the  general  power  of 
"Madame  Bovary"  I  find  myself  desiring  not  to  nar- 
row the  ground  of  the  lesson,  not  to  connect  the  lesson, 
to  its  prejudice,  with  that  idea  of  the  "technical," 
that  question  of  the  way  a  thing  is  done,  so  abhorrent, 
as  a  call  upon  attention,  in  whatever  art,  to  the  won- 
drous Anglo-Saxon  mind.  Without  proposing  Flau- 
bert as  the  type  of  the  newspaper  novelist,  or  as  an 
easy  alternative  to  golf  or  the  bicycle,  we  should  do 
him  less  than  justice  in  failing  to  insist  that  a  master- 
piece like  "Madame  Bovary"  may  benefit  even  with 
the  simple-minded  by  the  way  it  has  been  done.  It 
derives  from  its  firm  roundness  that  sign  of  all  rare 
works  that  there  is  something  in  it  for  every  one.  It 
may  be  read  ever  so  attentively,  ever  so  freely,  with- 
out a  suspicion  of  how  it  is  written,  to  say  nothing  of 
put  together;  it  may  equally  be  read  under  the  excite- 
ment of  these  perceptions  alone,  one  of  the  greatest 
known  to  the  reader  who  is  fully  open  to  them.  Both 
readers  will  have  been  transported,  which  is  all  any 
can  ask.  Leaving  the  first  of  them,  however  that  may 
be,  to  state  the  case  for  himself,  I  state  it  yet  again  for 


io2  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

the  second,  if  only  on  this  final  ground.  The  book  and 
its  companions  represent  for  us  a  practical  solution, 
Flaubert's  own  troubled  but  settled  one,  of  the  eternal 
dilemma  of  the  painter  of  life.  From  the  moment 
this  rash  adventurer  deals  with  his  mysterious  matter 
at  all  directly  his  desire  is  not  to  deal  with  it  stintedly. 
It  at  the  same  time  remains  true  that  from  the  moment 
he  desires  to  produce  forms  in  which  it  shall  be  pre- 
served, he  desires  that  these  forms,  things  of  his  crea- 
tion, shall  not  be,  as  testifying  to  his  way  with  them, 
weak  or  ignoble.  He  must  make  them  complete  and 
beautiful,  of  satisfactory  production,  intrinsically  in- 
teresting, under  peril  of  disgrace  with  those  who  know. 
Those  who  don't  know  of  course  don't  count  for  him, 
and  it  neither  helps  nor  hinders  him  to  say  that  every 
one  knows  about  life.  Every  one  does  not — it  is  dis- 
tinctly the  case  of  the  few;  and  if  it  were  in  fact  the 
case  of  the  many  the  knowledge  still  might  exist,  on 
the  evidence  around  us,  even  in  an  age  of  unprecedented 
printing,  without  attesting  itself  by  a  multiplication  of 
masterpieces.  The  question  for  the  artist  can  only  be 
of  doing  the  artistic  utmost,  and  thereby  of  seeing  the 
general  task.  When  it  is  seen  with  the  intensity  with 
which  it  presented  itself  to  Flaubert  a  lifetime  is  none 
too  much  for  fairly  tackling  it.  It  must  either  be  left 
alone  or  be  dealt  with,  and  to  leave  it  alone  is  a  com- 
paratively simple  matter. 

To  deal  with  it  is  on  the  other  hand  to  produce  a 
certain  number  of  finished  works;  there  being  no  other 
known  method;  and  the  quantity  of  life  depicted  will 
depend  on  this  array.  What  will  this  array,  however, 
depend  on,  and  what  will  condition  the  number  of  pieces 
of  which  it  is  composed?  The  "finish,"  evidently, 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  103 

that  the  formula  so  glibly  postulates  and  for  which  the 
novelist  is  thus  so  handsomely  responsible.  He  has 
on  the  one  side  to  feel  his  subject  and  on  the  other  side 
to  render  it,  and  there  are  undoubtedly  two  ways  in 
which  his  situation  may  be  expressed,  especially  per- 
haps by  himself.  The  more  he  feels  his  subject  the 
more  he  can  render  it — that  is  the  first  way.  The  more 
he  renders  it  the  more  he  can  feel  it — that  is  the  second 
way.  This  second  way  was  unmistakeably  Flaubert's, 
and  if  the  result  of  it  for  him  was  a  bar  to  abundant 
production  he  could  only  accept  such  an  incident  as 
part  of  the  game.  He  probably  for  that  matter  would 
have  challenged  any  easy  definition  of  "abundance," 
contested  the  application  of  it  to  the  repetition,  how- 
ever frequent,  of  the  thing  not  "done."  What  but  the 
"doing"  makes  the  thing,  he  would  have  asked,  and 
how  can  a  positive  result  from  a  mere  iteration  of 
negatives,  or  wealth  proceed  from  the  simple  addition 
of  so  many  instances  of  penury  ?  We  should  here,  in 
closer  communion  with  him,  have  got  into  his  highly 
characteristic  and  suggestive  view  of  the  fertilisation 
of  subject  by  form,  penetration  of  the  sense,  ever,  by 
the  expression — the  latter  reacting  creatively  on  the 
former;  a  conviction  in  the  light  of  which  he  appears 
to  have  wrought  with  real  consistency  and  which 
borrows  from  him  thus  its  high  measure  of  credit.  It 
would  undoubtedly  have  suffered  if  his  books  had  been 
things  of  a  loose  logic,  whereas  we  refer  to  it  not  only 
without  shame  but  with  an  encouraged  confidence  by 
their  showing  of  a  logic  so  close.  Let  the  phrase,  the 
form  that  the  whole  is  at  the  given  moment  staked  on, 
be  beautiful  and  related,  and  the  rest  will  take  care  of 
itself — such  is  a  rough  indication  of  Flaubert's  faith; 
which  has  the  importance  that  it  was  a  faith  sincere, 


io4  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

active  and  inspiring.  I  hasten  to  add  indeed  that  we 
must  most  of  all  remember  how  in  these  matters  every- 
thing hangs  on  definitions.  The  "beautiful,"  with 
our  author,  covered  for  the  phrase  a  great  deal  of 
ground,  and  when  every  sort  of  propriety  had  been 
gathered  in  under  it  and  every  relation,  in  a  complexity 
of  such,  protected,  the  idea  itself,  the  presiding  thought, 
ended  surely  by  being  pretty  well  provided  for. 

These,  however,  are  subordinate  notes,  and  the  plain 
question,  in  the  connection  I  have  touched  upon,  is  of 
whether  we  would  really  wish  him  to  have  written 
more  books,  say  either  of  the  type  of  "Bovary"  or  of 
the  type  of  "Salammbo,"  and  not  have  written  them 
so  well.  When  the  production  of  a  great  artist  who  has 
lived  a  length  of  years  has  been  small  there  is  always 
the  regret;  but  there  is  seldom,  any  more  than  here, 
the  conceivable  remedy.  For  the  case  is  doubtless 
predetermined  by  the  particular  kind  of  great  artist  a 
writer  happens  to  be,  and  this  even  if  when  we  come  to 
the  conflict,  to  the  historic  case,  deliberation  and  delay 
may  not  all  have  been  imposed  by  temperament.  The 
admirable  George  Sand,  Flaubert's  beneficent  friend 
and  correspondent,  is  exactly  the  happiest  example 
we  could  find  of  the  genius  constitutionally  incapable 
of  worry,  the  genius  for  whom  style  "came,"  for  whom 
the  sought  effect  was  ever  quickly  and  easily  struck  off, 
the  book  freely  and  swiftly  written,  and  who  conse- 
quently is  represented  for  us  by  upwards  of  ninety 
volumes.  If  the  comparison  were  with  this  lady's 
great  contemporary  the  elder  Dumas  the  disparity 
would  be  quadrupled,  but  that  ambiguous  genius, 
somehow  never  really  caught  by  us  in  the  fact  of  com- 
position, is  out  of  our  concern  here:  the  issue  is  of  those 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  105 

developments  of  expression  which  involve  a  style, 
and  as  Dumas  never  so  much  as  once  grazed  one  in 
all  his  long  career,  there  was  not  even  enough  of  that 
grace  in  him  for  a  fillip  of  the  finger-nail.  Flaubert  is 
at  any  rate  represented  by  six  books,  so  that  he  may  on 
that  estimate  figure  as  poor,  while  Madame  Sand, 
falling  so  little  short  of  a  hundred,  figures  as  rich; 
and  yet  the  fact  remains  that  I  can  refer  the  congenial 
mind  to  him  with  confidence  and  can  do  nothing  of 
the  sort  for  it  in  respect  to  Madame  Sand.  She  is 
loose  and  liquid  and  iridescent,  as  iridescent  as  we  may 
undertake  to  find  her;  but  I  can  imagine  compositions 
quite  without  virtue — the  virtue  I  mean,  of  sticking 
together — begotten  by  the  impulse  to  emulate  her. 
She  had  undoubtedly  herself  the  benefit  of  her  facility, 
but  are  we  not  left  wondering  to  what  extent  we  have 
it  ?  There  is  too  little  in  her,  by  the  literary  connection, 
for  the  critical  mind,  weary  of  much  wandering,  to 
rest  upon.  Flaubert  himself  wandered,  wandered  far, 
went  much  roundabout  and  sometimes  lost  himself 
by  the  way,  but  how  handsomely  he  provided  for  our 
present  repose !  He  found  the  French  language  incon- 
ceivably difficult  to  write  with  elegance  and  was  con- 
fronted with  the  equal  truths  that  elegance  is  the  last 
thing  that  languages,  even  as  they  most  mature,  seem 
to  concern  themselves  with,  and  that  at  the  same  time 
taste,  asserting  rights,  insists  on  it,  to  the  effect  of 
showing  us  in  a  boundless  circumjacent  waste  of  effort 
what  the  absence  of  it  may  mean.  He  saw  the  less  of 
this  desert  of  death  come  back  to  that — that  every- 
thing at  all  saved  from  it  for  us  since  the  beginning 
had  been  saved  by  a  soul  of  elegance  within,  or  in 
other  words  by  the  last  refinement  of  selection,  by  the 
indifference  on  the  part  of  the  very  idiom,  huge  quite 


io6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

other  than  "composing"  agent,  to  the  individual  pre- 
tension. Recognising  thus  that  to  carry  through  the 
individual  pretension  is  at  the  best  a  battle,  he  adored 
a  hard  surface  and  detested  a  soft  one — much  more  a 
muddled;  regarded  a  style  without  rhythm  and  har- 
mony as  in  a  work  of  pretended  beauty  no  style  at  all. 
He  considered  that  the  failure  of  complete  expression 
so  registered  made  of  the  work  of  pretended  beauty  a 
work  of  achieved  barbarity.  It  would  take  us  far  to 
glance  even  at  his  fewest  discriminations;  but  rhythm 
and  harmony  were  for  example  most  menaced  in  his 
scheme  by  repetition — when  repetition  had  not  a 
positive  grace;  and  were  above  all  most  at  the  mercy 
of  the  bristling  particles  of  which  our  modern  tongues 
are  mainly  composed  and  which  make  of  the  desired 
surface  a  texture  pricked  through,  from  beneath,  even 
to  destruction,  as  by  innumerable  thorns. 

On  these  lines  production  was  of  course  slow  work  for 
him — especially  as  he  met  the  difficulty,  met  it  with 
an  inveteracy  which  shows  how  it  can  be  met;  and  full 
of  interest  for  readers  of  English  speech  is  the  reflec- 
tion he  causes  us  to  make  as  to  the  possibility  of  suc- 
cess at  all  comparable  among  ourselves.  I  have  spoken 
of  his  groans  and  imprecations,  his  interminable  waits 
and  deep  despairs;  but  what  would  these  things  have 
been,  what  would  have  become  of  him  and  what  of  his 
wrought  residuum,  had  he  been  condemned  to  deal 
with  a  form  of  speech  consisting,  like  ours,  as  to  one 
part,  of  "that"  and  "which";  as  to  a  second  part,  of 
the  blest  "it,"  which  an  English  sentence  may  repeat 
in  three  or  four  opposed  references  without  in  the  least 
losing  caste;  as  to  a  third  face  of  all  the  "tos"  of  the 
infinitive  and  the  preposition;  as  to  a  fourth  of  our  pre- 


GUSTAVE  FLAUBERT  107 

cious  auxiliaries  "be"  and  "do";  and  as  to  a  fifth,  of 
whatever  survives  in  the  language  for  the  precious  art 
of  pleasing  ?  Whether  or  no  the  fact  that  the  painter 
of  "life"  among  us  has  to  contend  with  a  medium  in- 
trinsically indocile,  on  certain  sides,  like  our  own, 
whether  this  drawback  accounts  for  his  having  failed, 
in  our  time,  to  treat  us,  arrested  and  charmed,  to  a 
single  case  of  crowned  classicism,  there  is  at  any  rate 
no  doubt  that  we  in  some  degree  owe  Flaubert's  counter- 
weight for  that  deficiency  to  his  having,  on  his  own 
ground,  more  happily  triumphed.  By  which  I  do  not 
mean  that  "Madame  Bovary"  is  a  classic  because  the 
"thats,"  the  "its"  and  the  "tos"  are  made  to  march 
as  Orpheus  and  his  lute  made  the  beasts,  but  because 
the  element  of  order  and  harmony  works  as  a  symbol  of 
everything  else  that  is  preserved  for  us  by  the  history 
of  the  book.  The  history  of  the  book  remains  the 
lesson  and  the  important,  the  delightful  thing,  remains 
above  all  the  drama  that  moves  slowly  to  its  climax. 
It  is  what  we  come  back  to  for  the  sake  of  what  it  shows 
us.  We  see — from  the  present  to  the  past  indeed, 
never  alas  from  the  present  to  the  future — how  a  classic 
almost  inveterately  grows.  Unimportant,  unnoticed, 
or,  so  far  as  noticed,  contested,  unrelated,  alien,  it 
has  a  cradle  round  which  the  fairies  but  scantly  flock 
and  is  waited  on  in  general  by  scarce  a  hint  of  sig- 
nificance. The  significance  comes  by  a  process  slow 
and  small,  the  fact  only  that  one  perceptive  private 
reader  after  another  discovers  at  his  convenience  that 
the  book  is  rare.  The  addition  of  the  perceptive 
private  readers  is  no  quick  affair,  and  would  doubtless 
be  a  vain  one  did  they  not — while  plenty  of  other  much 
more  remarkable  books  come  and  go — accumulate  and 
count.  They  count  by  their  quality  and  continuity  of 


io8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

attention;  so  they  have  gathered  for  "Madame  Bo- 
vary,"  and  so  they  are  held.  That  is  really  once  more 
the  great  circumstance.  It  is  always  in  order  for  us 
to  feel  yet  again  what  it  is  we  are  held  by.  Such  is 
my  reason,  definitely,  for  speaking  of  Flaubert  as  the 
novelist's  novelist.  Are  we  not  moreover — and  let  it 
pass  this  time  as  a  happy  hope  ! — pretty  well  all  novel- 
ists now  ? 


HONORE  DE  BALZAC 
1902 


STRONGER  than  ever,  even  than  under  the  spell  of  first 
acquaintance  and  of  the  early  time,  is  the  sense — thanks 
to  a  renewal  of  intimacy  and,  I  am  tempted  to  say,  of 
loyalty — that  Balzac  stands  signally  apart,  that  he  is 
the  first  and  foremost  member  of  his  craft,  and  that 
above  all  the  Balzac-lover  is  in  no  position  till  he  has 
cleared  the  ground  by  saying  so.  The  Balzac-lover 
alone,  for  that  matter,  is  worthy  to  have  his  word  on 
so  happy  an  occasion  as  this1  about  the  author  of  "La 
Comedie  Humaine,"  and  it  is  indeed  not  easy  to  see 
how  the  amount  of  attention  so  inevitably  induced 
could  at  the  worst  have  failed  to  find  itself  turning  to 
an  act  of  homage.  I  have  been  deeply  affected,  to 
be  frank,  by  the  mere  refreshment  of  memory,  which 
has  brought  in  its  train  moreover  consequences  critical 
and  sentimental  too  numerous  to  figure  here  in  their 
completeness.  The  authors  and  the  books  that  have, 
as  we  say,  done  something  for  us,  become  part  of  the 
answer  to  our  curiosity  when  our  curiosity  had  the 
freshness  of  youth,  these  particular  agents  exist  for 
us,  with  the  lapse  of  time,  as  the  substance  itself  of 
knowledge:  they  have  been  intellectually  so  swallowed, 
digested  and  assimilated  that  we  take  their  general 

'The  appearance  of  a  translation  of  the  "Deux  Jeunes  Mariees"  in  A 
Century  of  French  Romance. 

109 


i  io  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

use  and  suggestion  for  granted,  cease  to  be  aware  of 
them  because  they  have  passed  out  of  sight.  But 
they  have  passed  out  of  sight  simply  by  having  passed 
into  our  lives.  They  have  become  a  part  of  our  per- 
sonal history,  a  part  of  ourselves,  very  often,  so  far 
as  we  may  have  succeeded  in  best  expressing  our- 
selves. Endless,  however,  are  the  uses  of  great  per- 
sons and  great  things,  and  it  may  easily  happen  in 
these  cases  that  the  connection,  even  as  an  "excite- 
ment"— the  form  mainly  of  the  connections  of  youth 
- — is  never  really  broken.  We  have  largely  been  living 
on  our  benefactor — which  is  the  highest  acknowledg- 
ment one  can  make;  only,  thanks  to  a  blest  law  that 
operates  in  the  long  run  to  rekindle  excitement,  we  are 
accessible  to  the  sense  of  having  neglected  him.  Even 
when  we  may  not  constantly  have  read  him  over  the 
neglect  is  quite  an  illusion,  but  the  illusion  perhaps 
prepares  us  for  the  finest  emotion  we  are  to  have  owed 
to  the  acquaintance.  Without  having  abandoned  or 
denied  our  author  we  yet  come  expressly  back  to  him, 
and  if  not  quite  in  tatters  and  in  penitence  like  the 
Prodigal  Son,  with  something  at  all  events  of  the  ten- 
derness with  which  we  revert  to  the  parental  thresh- 
old and  hearthstone,  if  not,  more  fortunately,  to  the 
parental  presence.  The  beauty  of  this  adventure, 
that  of  seeing  the  dust  blown  off  a  relation  that  had 
been  put  away  as  on  a  shelf,  almost  out  of  reach,  at 
the  back  of  one's  mind,  consists  in  finding  the  precious 
object  not  only  fresh  and  intact,  but  with  its  firm 
lacquer  still  further  figured,  gilded  and  enriched.  It 
is  all  overscored  with  traces  and  impressions — vivid, 
definite,  almost  as  valuable  as  itself — of  the  recog- 
nitions and  agitations  it  originally  produced  in  us.  Our 
old — that  is  our  young — feelings  are  very  nearly  what 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  in 

page  after  page  most  gives  us.  The  case  has  become 
a  case  of  authority  plus  association.  If  Balzac  in 
himself  is  indubitably  wanting  in  the  sufficiently  com- 
mon felicity  we  know  as  charm,  it  is  this  association 
that  may  on  occasion  contribute  the  grace. 

The  impression  then,  confirmed  and  brightened,  is  of 
the  mass  and  weight  of  the  figure  and  of  the  extent 
of  ground  it  occupies;  a  tract  on  which  we  might  all 
of  us  together  quite  pitch  our  little  tents,  open  our 
little  booths,  deal  in  our  little  wares,  and  not  materially 
either  diminish  the  area  or  impede  the  circulation  of 
the  occupant.  I  seem  to  see  him  in  such  an  image 
moving  about  as  Gulliver  among  the  pigmies,  and  not 
less  good-natured  than  Gulliver  for  the  exercise  of 
any  function,  without  exception,  that  can  illustrate 
his  larger  life.  The  first  and  the  last  word  about  the 
author  of  "Les  Contes  Drolatiques"  is  that  of  all 
novelists  he  is  the  most  serious — by  which  I  am  far 
from  meaning  that  in  the  human  comedy  as  he  shows 
it  the  comic  is  an  absent  quantity.  His  sense  of  the 
comic  was  on  the  scale  of  his  extraordinary  senses  in 
general,  though  his  expression  of  it  suffers  perhaps 
exceptionally  from  that  odd  want  of  elbow-room — the 
penalty  somehow  of  his  close-packed,  pressed-down 
contents — which  reminds  us  of  some  designedly  beauti- 
ful thing  but  half-disengaged  from  the  clay  or  the 
marble.  It  is  the  scheme  and  the  scope  that  are 
supreme  in  him,  applying  this  moreover  not  to  mere 
great  intention,  but  to  the  concrete  form,  the  proved 
case,  in  which  we  possess  them.  We  most  of  us  aspire 
to  achieve  at  the  best  but  a  patch  here  and  there,  to 
pluck  a  sprig  or  a  single  branch,  to  break  ground  in  a 
corner  of  the  great  garden  of  life.  Balzac's  plan  was 


ii2  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

simply  to  do  everything  that  could  be  done.  He 
proposed  to  himself  to  "turn  over"  the  great  garden 
from  north  to  south  and  from  east  to  west;  a  task- 
immense,  heroic,  to  this  day  immeasurable — that  he 
bequeathed  us  the  partial  performance  of,  a  prodig- 
ious ragged  clod,  in  the  twenty  monstrous  years  repre- 
senting his  productive  career,  years  of  concentration 
and  sacrifice  the  vision  of  which  still  makes  us  ache. 
He  had  indeed  a  striking  good  fortune,  the  only  one 
he  was  to  enjoy  as  an  harassed  and  exasperated  worker: 
the  great  garden  of  life  presented  itself  to  him  abso- 
lutely and  exactly  in  the  guise  of  the  great  garden  of 
France,  a  subject  vast  and  comprehensive  enough,  yet 
with  definite  edges  and  corners.  This  identity  of  his 
universal  with  his  local  and  national  vision  is  the 
particular  thing  we  should  doubtless  call  his  greatest 
strength  were  we  preparing  agreeably  to  speak  of  it 
also  as  his  visible  weakness.  Of  Balzac's  weaknesses, 
however,  it  takes  some  assurance  to  talk;  there  is 
always  plenty  of  time  for  them;  they  are  the  last 
signs  we  know  him  by — such  things  truly  as  in  other 
painters  of  manners  often  come  under  the  head  of 
mere  exuberance  of  energy.  So  little  in  short  do  they 
earn  the  invidious  name  even  when  we  feel  them  as 
defects. 

What  he  did  above  all  was  to  read  the  universe,  as 
hard  and  as  loud  as  he  could,  into  the  France  of  his 
time;  his  own  eyes  regarding  his  work  as  at  once  the 
drama  of  man  and  a  mirror  of  the  mass  of  social  phe- 
nomena the  most  rounded  and  registered,  most  or- 
ganised and  administered,  and  thereby  most  exposed 
to  systematic  observation  and  portrayal,  that  the 
world  had  seen.  There  are  happily  other  interesting 


HONORfi   DE   BALZAC  113 

societies,  but  these  are  for  schemes  of  such  an  order 
comparatively  loose  and  incoherent,  with  more  extent 
and  perhaps  more  variety,  but  with  less  of  the  great 
enclosed  and  exhibited  quality,  less  neatness  and 
sharpness  of  arrangement,  fewer  categories,  sub- 
divisions, juxtapositions.  Balzac's  France  was  both 
inspiring  enough  for  an  immense  prose  epic  and  re- 
ducible enough  for  a  report  or  a  chart.  To  allow  his 
achievement  all  its  dignity  we  should  doubtless  say 
also  treatable  enough  for  a  history,  since  it  was  as  a 
patient  historian,  a  Benedictine  of  the  actual,  the 
living  painter  of  his  living  time,  that  he  regarded  him- 
self and  handled  his  material.  All  painters  of  manners 
and  fashions,  if  we  will,  are  historians,  even  when  they 
least  don  the  uniform:  Fielding,  Dickens,  Thackeray, 
George  Eliot,  Hawthorne  among  ourselves.  But  the 
great  difference  between  the  great  Frenchman  and 
the  eminent  others  is  that,  with  an  imagination  of 
the  highest  power,  an  unequalled  intensity  of  vision,  he 
saw  his  subject  in  the  light  of  science  as  well,  in  the 
light  of  the  bearing  of  all  its  parts  on  each  other,  and 
under  pressure  of  a  passion  for  exactitude,  an  appetite, 
the  appetite  of  an  ogre,  for  all  the  kinds  of  facts. 
We  find  I  think  in  the  union  here  suggested  something 
like  the  truth  about  his  genius,  the  nearest  approach 
to  a  final  account  of  him.  Of  imagination  on  one  side 
all  compact,  he  was  on  the  other  an  insatiable  reporter 
of  the  immediate,  the  material,  the  current  combina- 
tion, and  perpetually  moved  by  the  historian's  impulse 
to  fix,  preserve  and  explain  them.  One  asks  one's  self 
as  one  reads  him  what  concern  the  poet  has  with  so 
much  arithmetic  and  so  much  criticism,  so  many 
statistics  and  documents,  what  concern  the  critic  and 
the  economist  have  with  so  many  passions,  characters 


n4  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

and  adventures.  The  contradiction  is  always  before 
us;  it  springs  from  the  inordinate  scale  of  the  author's 
two  faces;  it  explains  more  than  anything  else  his  ec- 
centricities and  difficulties.  It  accounts  for  his  want  of 
grace,  his  want  of  the  lightness  associated  with  an 
amusing  literary  form,  his  bristling  surface,  his  close- 
ness of  texture,  so  rough  with  richness,  yet  so  pro- 
ductive of  the  effect  we  have  in  mind  when  we  speak  of 
not  being  able  to  see  the  wood  for  the  trees. 

A  thorough-paced  votary,  for  that  matter,  can 
easily  afford  to  declare  at  once  that  this  confounding 
duality  of  character  does  more  things  still,  or  does  at 
least  the  most  important  of  all — introduces  us  without 
mercy  (mercy  for  ourselves  I  mean)  to  the  oddest  truth 
we  could  have  dreamed  of  meeting  in  such  a  connec- 
tion. It  was  certainly  a  priori  not  to  be  expected  we 
should  feel  it  of  him,  but  our  hero  is  after  all  not  in 
his  magnificence  totally  an  artist:  which  would  be  the 
strangest  thing  possible,  one  must  hasten  to  add,  were 
not  the  smallness  of  the  practical  difference  so  made 
even  stranger.  His  endowment  and  his  effect  are  each 
so  great  that  the  anomaly  makes  at  the  most  a  differ- 
ence only  by  adding  to  his  interest  for  the  critic. 
The  critic  worth  his  salt  is  indiscreetly  curious  and 
wants  ever  to  know  how  and  why — whereby  Balzac 
is  thus  a  still  rarer  case  for  him,  suggesting  that  ex- 
ceptional curiosity  may  have  exceptional  rewards. 
The  question  of  what  makes  the  artist  on  a  great 
scale  is  interesting  enough;  but  we  feel  it  in  Balzac's 
company  to  be  nothing  to  the  question  of  what  on  an 
equal  scale  frustrates  him.  The  scattered  pieces,  the 
disjecta  membra  of  the  character  are  here  so  numerous 
and  so  splendid  that  they  prove  misleading;  we  pile 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  115 

them  together,  and  the  heap  assuredly  is  monumental; 
it  forms  an  overtopping  figure.  The  genius  this  figure 
stands  for,  none  the  less,  is  really  such  a  lesson  to  the 
artist  as  perfection  itself  would  be  powerless  to  give; 
it  carries  him  so  much  further  into  the  special  mys- 
tery. Where  it  carries  him,  at  the  same  time,  I  must 
not  in  this  scant  space  attempt  to  say — which  would 
be  a  loss  of  the  fine  thread  of  my  argument.  I  stick 
to  our  point  in  putting  it,  more  concisely,  that  the 
artist  of  the  Comedie  Humaine  is  half  smothered  by 
the  historian.  Yet  it  belongs  as  well  to  the  matter 
also  to  meet  the  question  of  whether  the  historian 
himself  may  not  be  an  artist — in  which  case  Balzac's 
catastrophe  would  seem  to  lose  its  excuse.  The  answer 
of  course  is  that  the  reporter,  however  philosophic,  has 
one  law,  and  the  originator,  however  substantially  fed, 
has  another;  so  that  the  two  laws  can  with  no  sort  of 
harmony  or  congruity  make,  for  the  finer  sense,  a 
common  household.  Balzac's  catastrophe — so  to  name 
it  once  again — was  in  this  perpetual  conflict  and  final 
impossibility,  an  impossibility  that  explains  his  defeat 
on  the  classic  side  and  extends  so  far  at  times  as  to 
make  us  think  of  his  work  as,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
beauty,  a  tragic  waste  of  effort. 

What  it  would  come  to,  we  judge,  is  that  the  irrec- 
oncilability of  the  two  kinds  of  law  is,  more  simply 
expressed,  but  the  irreconcilability  of  two  different 
ways  of  composing  one's  effect.  The  principle  of 
composition  that  his  free  imagination  would  have,  or 
certainly  might  have,  handsomely  imposed  on  him  is 
perpetually  dislocated  by  the  quite  opposite  principle 
of  the  earnest  seeker,  the  inquirer  to  a  useful  end,  in 
whom  nothing  is  free  but  a  born  antipathy  to  his  yoke- 


u6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

fellow.  Such  a  production  as  "Le  Cure  de  Village," 
the  wonderful  story  of  Madame  Graslin,  so  nearly  a 
masterpiece  yet  so  ultimately  not  one,  would  be,  in 
this  connection,  could  I  take  due  space  for  it,  a  perfect 
illustration.  If,  as  I  say,  Madame  Graslin's  creator 
was  confined  by  his  doom  to  patches  and  pieces,  no 
piece  is  finer  than  the  first  half  of  the  book  in  question, 
the  half  in  which  the  picture  is  determined  by  his 
unequalled  power  of  putting  people  on  their  feet, 
planting  them  before  us  in  their  habit  as  they  lived — 
a  faculty  nourished  by  observation  as  much  as  one  will, 
but  with  the  inner  vision  all  the  while  wide-awake,  the 
vision  for  which  ideas  are  as  living  as  facts  and  assume 
an  equal  intensity.  This  intensity,  greatest  indeed  in 
the  facts,  has  in  Balzac  a  force  all  its  own,  to  which 
none  other  in  any  novelist  I  know  can  be  likened.  His 
touch  communicates  on  the  spot  to  the  object,  the 
creature  evoked,  the  hardness  and  permanence  that 
certain  substances,  some  sorts  of  stone,  acquire  by  ex- 
posure to  the  air.  The  hardening  medium,  for  the 
image  soaked  in  it,  is  the  air  of  his  mind.  It  would 
take  but  little  more  to  make  the  peopled  world  of 
fiction  as  we  know  it  elsewhere  affect  us  by  contrast 
as  a  world  of  rather  gray  pulp.  This  mixture  of  the 
solid  and  the  vivid  is  Balzac  at  his  best,  and  it  pre- 
vails without  a  break,  without  a  note  not  admirably 
true,  in  "Le  Cure  de  Village" — since  I  have  named 
that  instance — up  to  the  point  at  which  Madame 
Graslin  moves  out  from  Limoges  to  Montegnac  in  her 
ardent  passion  of  penitence,  her  determination  to 
expiate  her  strange  and  undiscovered  association  with 
a  dark  misdeed  by  living  and  working  for  others.  Her 
drama  is  a  particularly  inward  one,  interesting,  and 
in  the  highest  degree,  so  long  as  she  herself,  her  nature, 


HONORS   DE   BALZAC  117 

her  behaviour,  her  personal  history  and  the  relations 
in  which  they  place  her,  control  the  picture  and  feed 
our  illusion.  The  firmness  with  which  the  author 
makes  them  play  this  part,  the  whole  constitution  of 
the  scene  and  of  its  developments  from  the  moment 
we  cross  the  threshold  of  her  dusky  stuffy  old-time 
birth-house,  is  a  rare  delight,  producing  in  the  reader 
that  sense  of  local  and  material  immersion  which  is 
one  of  Balzac's  supreme  secrets.  What  character- 
istically befalls,  however,  is  that  the  spell  accompanies 
us  but  part  of  the  way — only  until,  at  a  given  moment, 
his  attention  ruthlessly  transfers  itself  from  inside  to 
outside,  from  the  centre  of  his  subject  to  its  circum- 
ference. 

This  is  Balzac  caught  in  the  very  fact  of  his  mon- 
strous duality,  caught  in  his  most  complete  self-ex- 
pression. He  is  clearly  quite  unwitting  that  in  hand- 
ing over  his  data  to  his  twin-brother  the  impassioned 
economist  and  surveyor,  the  insatiate  general  inquirer 
and  reporter,  he  is  in  any  sort  betraying  our  confidence, 
for  his  good  conscience  at  such  times,  the  spirit  of 
edification  in  him,  is  a  lesson  even  to  the  best  of  us, 
his  rich  robust  temperament  nowhere  more  striking, 
no  more  marked  anywhere  the  great  push  of  the 
shoulder  with  which  he  makes  his  theme  move,  over- 
charged though  it  may  be  like  a  carrier's  van.  It  is 
not  therefore  assuredly  that  he  loses  either  sincerity  or 
power  in  putting  before  us  to  the  last  detail  such  a  mat- 
ter as,  in  this  case,  his  heroine's  management  of  her 
property,  her  tenantry,  her  economic  opportunities  and 
visions,  for  these  are  cases  in  which  he  never  shrinks 
nor  relents,  in  which  positively  he  stiffens  and  terribly 
towers — to  remind  us  again  of  M.  Taine's  simplifying 


n8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

word  about  his  being  an  artist  doubled  with  a  man  of 
business.  Balzac  was  indeed  doubled  if  ever  a  writer 
was,  and  to  that  extent  that  we  almost  as  often,  while 
we  read,  feel  ourselves  thinking  of  him  as  a  man  of 
business  doubled  with  an  artist.  Whichever  way  we 
turn  it  the  oddity  never  fails,  nor  the  wonder  of  the 
ease  with  which  either  character  bears  the  burden  of 
the  other.  I  use  the  word  burden  because,  as  the  fusion 
is  never  complete — witness  in  the  book  before  us  the 
fatal  break  of  "tone,"  the  one  unpardonable  sin  for 
the  novelist — we  are  beset  by  the  conviction  that  but 
for  this  strangest  of  dooms  one  or  other  of  the  two 
partners  might,  to  our  relief  and  to  his  own,  have  been 
disembarrassed.  The  disembarrassment,  for  each,  by 
a  more  insidious  fusion,  would  probably  have  conduced 
to  the  mastership  of  interest  proceeding  from  form,  or 
at  all  events  to  the  search  for  it,  that  Balzac  fails  to 
embody.  Perhaps  the  possibility  of  an  artist  con- 
structed on  such  strong  lines  is  one  of  those  fine  things 
that  are  not  of  this  world,  a  mere  dream  of  the  fond 
critical  spirit.  Let  these  speculations  and  condona- 
tions at  least  pass  as  the  amusement,  as  a  result  of  the 
high  spirits — if  high  spirits  be  the  word — of  the  reader 
feeling  himself  again  in  touch.  It  was  not  of  our 
author's  difficulties — that  is  of  his  difficulty,  the  great 
one — that  I  proposed  to  speak,  but  of  his  immense 
clear  action.  Even  that  is  not  truly  an  impression  of 
ease,  and  it  is  strange  and  striking  that  we  are  in  fact 
so  attached  by  his  want  of  the  unity  that  keeps  sur- 
faces smooth  and  dangers  down  as  scarce  to  feel  sure 
at  any  moment  that  we  shall  not  come  back  to  it 
with  most  curiosity.  We  are  never  so  curious  about 
successes  as  about  interesting  failures.  The  more 
reason  therefore  to  speak  promptly,  and  once  for  all, 


HONORS   DE   BALZAC  119 

of  the  scale  on  which,  in  its  own  quarter  of  his  genius, 
success  worked  itself  out  for  him. 

It  is  to  that  I  should  come  back — to  the  infinite  reach 
in  him  of  the  painter  and  the  poet.  We  can  never  know 
what  might  have  become  of  him  with  less  importunity 
in  his  consciousness  of  the  machinery  of  life,  of  its 
furniture  and  fittings,  of  all  that,  right  and  left,  he 
causes  to  assail  us,  sometimes  almost  to  suffocation, 
under  the  general  rubric  of  things.  Things,  in  this 
sense  with  him,  are  at  once  our  delight  and  our  despair; 
we  pass  from  being  inordinately  beguiled  and  con- 
vinced by  them  to  feeling  that  his  universe  fairly 
smells  too  much  of  them,  that  the  larger  ether,  the 
diviner  air,  is  in  peril  of  finding  among  them  scarce 
room  to  circulate.  His  landscapes,  his  "local  colour" 
—thick  in  his  pages  at  a  time  when  it  was  to  be  found 
in  his  pages  almost  alone — his  towns,  his  streets,  his 
houses,  his  Saumurs,  Angoulemes,  Guerandes,  his  great 
prose  Turner-views  of  the  land  of  the  Loire,  his  rooms, 
shops,  interiors,  details  of  domesticity  and  traffic,  are 
a  short  list  of  the  terms  into  which  he  saw  the  real 
as  clamouring  to  be  rendered  and  into  which  he  ren- 
dered it  with  unequalled  authority.  It  would  be 
doubtless  more  to  the  point  to  make  our  profit  of  this 
consummation  than  to  try  to  reconstruct  a  Balzac 
planted  more  in  the  open.  We  hardly,  as  the  case 
stands,  know  most  whether  to  admire  in  such  an  ex- 
ample as  the  short  tale  of  "La  Grenadiere"  the  ex- 
quisite feeling  for  "natural  objects"  with  which  it 
overflows  like  a  brimming  wine-cup,  the  energy  of 
perception  and  description  which  so  multiplies  them 
for  beauty's  sake  and  for  the  love  of  their  beauty,  or 
the  general  wealth  of  genius  that  can  calculate,  or  at 


120  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

least  count,  so  little  and  spend  so  joyously.  The  tale 
practically  exists  for  the  sake  of  the  enchanting  as- 
pects involved — those  of  the  embowered  white  house 
that  nestles  on  its  terraced  hill  above  the  great  French 
river,  and  we  can  think,  frankly,  of  no  one  else  with 
an  equal  amount  of  business  on  his  hands  who  would 
either  have  so  put  himself  out  for  aspects  or  made  them 
almost  by  themselves  a  living  subject.  A  born  son  of 
Touraine,  it  must  be,  said,  he  pictures  his  province, 
on  every  pretext  and  occasion,  with  filial  passion  and 
extraordinary  breadth.  The  prime  aspect  in  his 
scene  all  the  while,  it  must  be  added,  is  the  money 
aspect.  The  general  money  question  so  loads  him  up 
and  weighs  him  down  that  he  moves  through  the  human 
comedy,  from  beginning  to  end,  very  much  in  the 
fashion  of  a  camel,  the  ship  of  the  desert,  surmounted 
with  a  cargo.  "Things"  for  him  are  francs  and  cen- 
times more  than  any  others,  and  I  give  up  as  inscru- 
table, unfathomable,  the  nature,  the  peculiar  avidity 
of  his  interest  in  them.  It  makes  us  wonder  again 
and  again  what  then  is  the  use  on  Balzac's  scale  of 
the  divine  faculty.  The  imagination,  as  we  all  know, 
may  be  employed  up  to  a  certain  point  in  inventing 
uses  for  money;  but  its  office  beyond  that  point  is 
surely  to  make  us  forget  that  anything  so  odious  exists. 
This  is  what  Balzac  never  forgot;  his  universe  goes  on 
expressing  itself  for  him,  to  its  furthest  reaches,  on 
its  finest  sides,  in  the  terms  of  the  market.  To  say 
these  things,  however,  is  after  all  to  come  out  where 
we  want,  to  suggest  his  extraordinary  scale  and  his 
terrible  completeness.  I  am  not  sure  that  he  does  not 
see  character  too,  see  passion,  motive,  personality,  as 
quite  in  the  order  of  the  "things"  we  have  spoken  of. 
He  makes  them  no  less  concrete  and  palpable,  handles 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  121 

them  no  less  directly  and  freely.  It  is  the  whole  busi- 
ness in  fine — that  grand  total  to  which  he  proposed  to 
himself  to  do  high  justice — that  gives  him  his  place 
apart,  makes  him,  among  the  novelists,  the  largest 
weightiest  presence.  There  are  some  of  his  obsessions 
—that  of  the  material,  that  of  the  financial,  that  of 
the  "social,"  that  of  the  technical,  political,  civil — 
for  which  I  feel  myself  unable  to  judge  him,  judgment 
losing  itself  unexpectedly  in  a  particular  shade  of  pity. 
The  way  to  judge  him  is  to  try  to  walk  all  round  him — 
on  which  we  see  how  remarkably  far  we  have  to  go. 
He  is  the  only  member  of  his  order  really  monumental, 
the  sturdiest-seated  mass  that  rises  in  our  path. 

II 

We  recognise  none  the  less  that  the  finest  conse- 
quence of  these  re-established  relations  is  linked  with 
just  that  appearance  in  him,  that  obsession  of  the 
actual  under  so  many  heads,  that  makes  us  look  at 
him,  as  we  would  at  some  rare  animal  in  captivity,  be- 
tween the  bars  of  a  cage.  It  amounts  to  a  sort  of  suf- 
fered doom,  since  to  be  solicited  by  the  world  from 
all  quarters  at  once,  what  is  that  for  the  spirit  but  a 
denial  of  escape  ?  We  feel  his  doom  to  be  his  want  of 
a  private  door,  and  that  he  felt  it,  though  more  ob- 
scurely, himself.  When  we  speak  of  his  want  of  charm 
therefore  we  perhaps  so  surrender  the  question  as  but 
to  show  our  own  poverty.  If  charm,  to  cut  it  short, 
is  what  he  lacks,  how  comes  it  that  he  so  touches  and 
holds  us  that — above  all  if  we  be  actual  or  possible 
fellow-workers — we  are  uncomfortably  conscious  of 
the  disloyalty  of  almost  any  shade  of  surrender  ?  We 
are  lodged  perhaps  by  our  excited  sensibility  in  a  di- 


122  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

lemma  of  which  one  of  the  horns  is  a  compassion  that 
savours  of  patronage;  but  we  must  resign  ourselves 
to  that  by  reflecting  that  our  partiality  at  least  takes 
nothing  away  from  him.  It  leaves  him  solidly  where 
he  is  and  only  brings  us  near,  brings  us  to  a  view  of  all 
his  formidable  parts  and  properties.  The  conception 
of  the  Comedie  Humaine  represents  them  all,  and  rep- 
resents them  mostly  in  their  felicity  and  their  triumph 
— or  at  least  the  execution  does:  in  spite  of  which  we 
irresistibly  find  ourselves  thinking  of  him,  in  reperusals, 
as  most  essentially  the  victim  of  a  cruel  joke.  The 
joke  is  one  of  the  jokes  of  fate,  the  fate  that  rode  him 
for  twenty  years  at  so  terrible  a  pace  and  with  the  whip 
so  constantly  applied.  To  have  wanted  to  do  so  much, 
to  have  thought  it  possible,  to  have  faced  and  in  a  man- 
ner resisted  the  effort,  to  have  felt  life  poisoned  and 
consumed  by  such  a  bravery  of  self-committal — these 
things  form  for  us  in  him  a  face  of  trouble  that,  oddly 
enough,  is  not  appreciably  lighted  by  the  fact  of  his 
success.  It  was  the  having  wanted  to  do  so  much  that 
was  the  trap,  whatever  possibilities  of  glory  might 
accompany  the  good  faith  with  which  he  fell  into  it. 
What  accompanies  us  as  we  frequent  him  is  a  sense  of 
the  deepening  ache  of  that  good  faith  with  the  increase 
of  his  working  consciousness,  the  merciless  develop- 
ment of  his  huge  subject  and  of  the  rigour  of  all  the 
conditions.  We  see  the  whole  thing  quite  as  if  Des- 
tiny had  said  to  him:  "You  want  to  'do'  France,  pre- 
sumptuous, magnificent,  miserable  man — the  France 
of  revolutions,  revivals,  restorations,  of  Bonapartes, 
Bourbons,  republics,  of  war  and  peace,  of  blood  and 
romanticism,  of  violent  change  and  intimate  continuity, 
the  France  of  the  first  half  of  your  century  ?  Very 
well;  you  most  distinctly  shall,  and  you  shall  partic- 


HONORS   DE   BALZAC  123 

ularly  let  me  hear,  even  if  the  great  groan  of  your 
labour  do  fill  at  moments  the  temple  of  letters,  how  you 
like  the  job."  We  must  of  course  not  appear  to  deny 
the  existence  of  a  robust  joy  in  him,  the  joy  of  power 
and  creation,  the  joy  of  the  observer  and  the  dreamer 
who  finds  a  use  for  his  observations  and  his  dreams 
as  fast  as  they  come.  The  "Contes  Drolatiques" 
would  by  themselves  sufficiently  contradict  us,  and  the 
savour  of  the  "Contes  Drolatiques"  is  not  confined  to 
these  productions.  His  work  at  large  tastes  of  the 
same  kind  of  humour,  and  we  feel  him  again  and  again, 
like  any  other  great  healthy  producer  of  these  matters, 
beguiled  and  carried  along.  He  would  have  been,  I 
dare  say,  the  last  not  to  insist  that  the  artist  has  plea- 
sures forever  indescribable;  he  lived  in  short  in  his 
human  comedy  with  the  largest  life  we  can  attribute 
to  the  largest  capacity.  There  are  particular  parts  of 
his  subject  from  which,  with  our  sense  of  his  enjoy- 
ment of  them,  we  have  to  check  the  impulse  to  call  him 
away — frequently  as  I  confess  in  this  relation  that  im- 
pulse arises. 

The  relation  is  with  the  special  element  of  his  spec- 
tacle from  which  he  never  fully  detaches  himself,  the 
element,  to  express  it  succinctly,  of  the  "old  families" 
and  the  great  ladies.  Balzac  frankly  revelled  in  his 
conception  of  an  aristocracy — a  conception  that  never 
succeeded  in  becoming  his  happiest;  whether,  objec- 
tively, thanks  to  the  facts  supplied  him  by  the  society 
he  studied,  or  through  one  of  the  strangest  deviations 
of  taste  that  the  literary  critic  is  in  an  important  con- 
nection likely  to  encounter.  Nothing  would  in  fact 
be  more  interesting  than  to  attempt  a  general  measure 
of  the  part  played  in  the  total  comedy,  to  his  imagina- 


i24  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

tion,  by  the  old  families;  and  one  or  two  contributions 
to  such  an  attempt  I  must  not  fail  presently  to  make. 
I  glance  at  them  here,  however,  the  delectable  class, 
but  as  most  representing  on  the  author's  part  free  and 
amused  creation;  by  which  too  I  am  far  from  hinting 
that  the  amusement  is  at  all  at  their  expense.  It  is  in 
their  great  ladies  that  the  old  families  most  shine  out 
for  him,  images  of  strange  colour  and  form,  but  "felt" 
as  we  say,  to  their  finger-tips,  and  extraordinarily  in- 
teresting as  a  mark  of  the  high  predominance — pre- 
dominance of  character,  of  cleverness,  of  will,  of  gen- 
eral "personality" — that  almost  every  scene  of  the 
Comedy  attributes  to  women.  It  attributes  to  them 
in  fact  a  recognised,  an  uncontested  supremacy;  it 
is  through  them  that  the  hierarchy  of  old  families  most 
expresses  itself;  and  it  is  as  surrounded  by  them  even 
as  some  magnificent  indulgent  pasha  by  his  overflow- 
ing seraglio  that  Balzac  sits  most  at  his  ease.  All  of 
which  reaffirms — if  it  be  needed — that  his  inspiration, 
and  the  sense  of  it,  were  even  greater  than  his  task. 
And  yet  such  betrayals  of  spontaneity  in  him  make 
for  an  old  friend  at  the  end  of  the  chapter  no  great  dif- 
ference in  respect  to  the  pathos — since  it  amounts  to 
that — of  his  genius-ridden  aspect.  It  comes  to  us  as 
we  go  back  to  him  that  his  spirit  had  fairly  made  of 
itself  a  cage  in  which  he  was  to  turn  round  and  round, 
always  unwinding  his  reel,  much  in  the  manner  of 
a  criminal  condemned  to  hard  labour  for  life.  The 
cage  is  simply  the  complicated  but  dreadfully  definite 
French  world  that  built  itself  so  solidly  in  and  roofed 
itself  so  impenetrably  over  him. 

It  is  not  that,  caught  there  with  him  though  we  be, 
we  ourselves  prematurely  seek  an  issue:  we  throw  our- 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  125 

selves  back,  on  the  contrary,  for  the  particular  sense  of 
it,  into  his  ancient  superseded  comparatively  rococo 
and  quite  patriarchal  France — patriarchal  in  spite  of 
social  and  political  convulsions;  into  his  old-time  ante- 
diluvian Paris,  all  picturesque  and  all  workable,  full, 
to  the  fancy,  of  an  amenity  that  has  passed  away; 
into  his  intensely  differentiated  sphere  of  la  province, 
evoked  in  each  sharpest  or  faintest  note  of  its  differ- 
ence, described  systematically  as  narrow  and  flat,  and 
yet  attaching  us  if  only  by  the  contagion  of  the  author's 
overflowing  sensibility.  He  feels  in  his  vast  exhibition 
many  things,  but  there  is  nothing  he  feels  with  the 
communicable  shocks  and  vibrations,  the  sustained  fury 
of  perception — not  always  a  fierceness  of  judgment, 
which  is  another  matter — that  la  province  excites  in 
him.  Half  our  interest  in  him  springs  still  from  our 
own  sense  that,  for  all  the  convulsions,  the  revolutions 
and  experiments  that  have  come  and  gone,  the  order 
he  describes  is  the  old  order  that  our  sense  of  the  past 
perversely  recurs  to  as  to  something  happy  we  have 
irretrievably  missed.  His  pages  bristle  with  the  revela- 
tion of  the  lingering  earlier  world,  the  world  in  which 
places  and  people  still  had  their  queerness,  their  strong 
marks,  their  sharp  type,  and  in  which,  as  before  the 
platitude  that  was  to  come,  the  observer  with  an  appe- 
tite for  the  salient  could  by  way  of  precaution  fill  his 
lungs.  Balzac's  appetite  for  the  salient  was  voracious, 
yet  he  came,  as  it  were,  in  time,  in  spite  of  his  so  often 
speaking  as  if  what  he  sees  about  him  is  but  the  last 
desolation  of  the  modern.  His  conservatism,  the  most 
entire,  consistent  and  convinced  that  ever  was — yet 
even  at  that  much  inclined  to  whistling  in  the  dark  as 
if  to  the  tune  of  "Oh  how  mediaeval  I  am!" — was  doubt- 
less the  best  point  of  view  from  which  he  could  rake  his 


126  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

field.  But  if  what  he  sniffed  from  afar  in  that  position 
was  the  extremity  of  change,  we  in  turn  feel  both 
subject  and  painter  drenched  with  the  smell  of  the  past. 
It  is  preserved  in  his  work  as  nowhere  else — not  vague 
nor  faint  nor  delicate,  but  as  strong  to-day  as  when 
first  distilled. 

It  may  seem  odd  to  find  a  conscious  melancholy  in 
the  fact  that  a  great  worker  succeeded  in  clasping  his 
opportunity  in  such  an  embrace,  this  being  exactly 
our  usual  measure  of  the  felicity  of  great  workers.  I 
speak,  I  hasten  to  reassert,  all  in  the  name  of  sympa- 
thy— without  which  it  would  have  been  detestable  to 
speak  at  all;  and  the  sentiment  puts  its  hand  instinc- 
tively on  the  thing  that  makes  it  least  futile.  This 
particular  thing  then  is  not  in  the  least  Balzac's  own 
hold  of  his  terrible  mass  of  matter;  it  is  absolutely  the 
convolutions  of  the  serpent  he  had  with  a  magnificent 
courage  invited  to  wind  itself  round  him.  We  must 
use  the  common  image — he  had  created  his  Franken- 
stein monster.  It  is  the  fellow-craftsman  who  can 
most  feel  for  him — it  being  apparently  possible  to  read 
him  from  another  point  of  view  without  getting  really 
into  his  presence.  We  undergo  with  him  from  book 
to  book,  from  picture  to  picture,  the  convolutions  of 
the  serpent,  we  especially  whose  refined  performances 
are  given,  as  we  know,  but  with  the  small  common  or 
garden  snake.  I  stick  to  this  to  justify  my  image 
just  above  of  his  having  been  "caged"  by  the  intensity 
with  which  he  saw  his  general  matter  as  a  whole.  To 
see  it  always  as  a  whole  is  our  wise,  our  virtuous  effort, 
the  very  condition,  as  we  keep  in  mind,  of  superior 
art.  Balzac  was  in  this  connection  then  wise  and  vir- 
tuous to  the  most  exemplary  degree;  so  that  he  doubt- 


HONORS  DE   BALZAC  127 

less  ought  logically  but  to  prompt  to  complacent  reflec- 
tions. No  painter  ever  saw  his  general  matter  nearly 
so  much  as  a  whole.  Why  is  it  then  that  we  hover 
about  him,  if  we  are  real  Balzacians,  not  with  cheerful 
chatter,  but  with  a  consideration  deeper  in  its  reach 
than  any  mere  moralising  ?  The  reason  is  largely  that 
if  you  wish  with  absolute  immaculate  virtue  to  look 
at  your  matter  as  a  whole  and  yet  remain  a  theme  for 
cheerful  chatter,  you  must  be  careful  to  take  some 
quantity  that  will  not  hug  you  to  death.  Balzac's 
active  intention  was,  to  vary  our  simile,  a  beast  with 
a  hundred  claws,  and  the  spectacle  is  in  the  hugging 
process  of  which,  as  energy  against  energy,  the  beast 
was  capable.  Its  victim  died  of  the  process  at  fifty, 
and  if  what  we  see  in  the  long  gallery  in  which  it  is 
mirrored  is  not  the  defeat,  but  the  admirable  resistance, 
we  none  the  less  never  lose  the  sense  that  the  fighter  is 
shut  up  with  his  fate.  He  has  locked  himself  in — it 
is  doubtless  his  own  fault — and  thrown  the  key  away. 
Most  of  all  perhaps  the  impression  comes — the  impres- 
sion of  the  adventurer  committed  and  anxious,  but 
with  no  retreat — from  the  so  formidably  concrete 
nature  of  his  plastic  stuff.  When  we  work  in  the  open, 
as  it  were,  our  material  is  not  classed  and  catalogued, 
so  that  we  have  at  hand  a  hundred  ways  of  being  loose, 
superficial,  disingenuous,  and  yet  passing,  to  our  no 
small  profit,  for  remarkable.  Balzac  had  no  "open"; 
he  held  that  the  great  central  normal  fruitful  country 
of  his  birth  and  race,  overarched  with  its  infinite  social 
complexity,  yielded  a  sufficiency  of  earth  and  sea  and 
sky.  We  seem  to  see  as  his  catastrophe  that  the  sky, 
all  the  same,  came  down  on  him.  He  couldn't  keep 
it  up — in  more  senses  than  one.  These  are  perhaps 
fine  fancies  for  a  critic  to  weave  about  a  literary  figure 


128  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

of  whom  he  has  undertaken  to  give  a  plain  account; 
but  I  leave  them  so  on  the  plea  that  there  are  rela- 
tions in  which,  for  the  Balzacian,  criticism  simply 
drops  out.  That  is  not  a  liberty,  I  admit,  ever  to  be 
much  encouraged;  critics  in  fact  are  the  only  people 
who  have  a  right  occasionally  to  take  it.  There  is  no 
such  plain  account  of  the  Comedie  Humaine  as  that 
it  makes  us  fold  up  our  yard-measure  and  put  away 
our  note-book  quite  as  we  do  with  some  extraordinary 
character,  some  mysterious  and  various  stranger,  who 
brings  with  him  his  own  standards  and  his  own  air. 
There  is  a  kind  of  eminent  presence  that  abashes  even 
the  interviewer,  moves  him  to  respect  and  wonder, 
makes  him,  for  consideration  itself,  not  insist.  This 
takes  of  course  a  personage  sole  of  his  kind.  But 
such  a  personage  precisely  is  Balzac. 

Ill 

By  all  of  which  have  I  none  the  less  felt  it  but  too 
clear  that  I  must  not  pretend  in  this  place  to  take 
apart  the  pieces  of  his  immense  complicated  work,  to 
number  them  or  group  them  or  dispose  them  about. 
The  most  we  can  do  is  to  pick  one  up  here  and  there 
and  wonder,  as  we  weigh  it  in  our  hand,  at  its  close 
compact  substance.  That  is  all  even  M.  Taine  could 
do  in  the  longest  and  most  penetrating  study  of  which 
our  author  has  been  the  subject.  Every  piece  we  han- 
dle is  so  full  of  stuff,  condensed  like  the  edibles  pro- 
vided for  campaigns  and  explorations,  positively  so 
charged  with  distilled  life,  that  we  find  ourselves  drop- 
ping it,  in  certain  states  of  sensibility,  as  we  drop  an 
object  unguardedly  touched  that  startles  us  by  being 
animate.  We  seem  really  scarce  to  want  anything 


HONORfi   DE   BALZAC  129 

to  be  so  animate.  It  would  verily  take  Balzac  to  de- 
tail Balzac,  and  he  has  had  in  fact  Balzacians  nearly 
enough  affiliated  to  affront  the  task  with  courage. 
The  "  Repertoire  de  la  Comedie  Humaine"  of  MM. 
Anatole  Cerfberr  and  Jules  Christophe  is  a  closely- 
printed  octavo  of  550  pages  which  constitutes  in  rela- 
tion to  his  characters  great  and  small  an  impeccable 
biographical  dictionary.  His  votaries  and  expositors 
are  so  numerous  that  the  Balzac  library  of  com- 
ment and  research  must  be,  of  its  type,  one  of  the 
most  copious.  M.  de  Lovenjoul  has  laboured  all 
round  the  subject;  his  "Histoire  des  CEuvres"  alone 
is  another  crowded  octavo  of  400  pages;  in  connection 
with  which  I  must  mention  Miss  Wormeley,  the  de- 
voted American  translator,  interpreter,  worshipper, 
who  in  the  course  of  her  own  studies  has  so  often 
found  occasion  to  differ  from  M.  de  Lovenjoul  on  mat- 
ters of  fact  and  questions  of  date  and  of  appreciation. 
Miss  Wormeley,  M.  Paul  Bourget  and  many  others 
are  examples  of  the  passionate  piety  that  our  author 
can  inspire.  As  I  turn  over  the  encyclopedia  of  his 
characters  I  note  that  whereas  such  works  usually 
commemorate  but  the  ostensibly  eminent  of  a  race 
and  time,  every  creature  so  much  as  named  in  the 
fictive  swarm  is  in  this  case  preserved  to  fame:  so 
close  is  the  implication  that  to  have  been  named  by 
such  a  dispenser  of  life  and  privilege  is  to  be,  as  we  say 
it  of  baronets  and  peers,  created.  He  infinitely  divided 
moreover,  as  we  know,  he  subdivided,  altered  and 
multiplied  his  heads  and  categories — his  "Vie  Pari- 
sienne,"  his  "Vie  de  Province,"  his  "Vie  Politique,"  his 
"Parents  Pauvres,"  his  "£tudes  Philosophiques,"  his 
"Splendeurs  et  Miseres  des  Courtisanes,"  his  "Envers 
de  1'Histoire  Contemporaine"  and  all  the  rest;  so  that 


1 30  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

nominal  reference  to  them  becomes  the  more  difficult. 
Yet  without  prejudice  either  to  the  energy  of  concep- 
tion with  which  he  mapped  out  his  theme  as  with 
chalk  on  a  huge  blackboard,  or  to  the  prodigious  pa- 
tience with  which  he  executed  his  plan,  practically 
rilling  in  with  a  wealth  of  illustration,  from  sources 
that  to  this  day  we  fail  to  make  out,  every  compart- 
ment of  his  table,  M.  de  Lovenjoul  draws  up  the  list, 
year  by  year,  from  1822  to  1848,  of  his  mass  of  work, 
giving  us  thus  the  measure  of  the  tension  represented 
for  him  by  almost  any  twelvemonth.  It  is  wholly 
unequalled,  considering  the  quality  of  Balzac's  show, 
by  any  other  eminent  abundance. 

I  must  be  pardoned  for  coming  back  to  it,  for  seem- 
ing unable  to  leave  it;  it  enshrouds  so  interesting  a 
mystery.  How  was  so  solidly  systematic  a  literary 
attack  on  life  to  be  conjoined  with  whatever  workable 
minimum  of  needful  intermission,  of  free  observation, 
of  personal  experience  ?  Some  small  possibility  of  per- 
sonal experience  and  disinterested  life  must,  at  the 
worst,  from  deep  within  or  far  without,  feed  and  fortify 
the  strained  productive  machine.  These  things  were 
luxuries  that  Balzac  appears  really  never  to  have  tasted 
on  any  appreciable  scale.  His  published  letters — the 
driest  and  most  starved  of  those  of  any  man  of  equal 
distinction — are  with  the  exception  of  those  to  Madame 
de  Hanska,  whom  he  married  shortly  before  his  death, 
almost  exclusively  the  audible  wail  of  a  galley-slave 
chained  to  the  oar.  M.  Zola,  in  our  time,  among  the 
novelists,  has  sacrificed  to  the  huge  plan  in  something 
of  the  same  manner,  yet  with  goodly  modern  differences 
that  leave  him  a  comparatively  simple  instance.  His 
work  assuredly  has  been  more  nearly  dried  up  by  the 


HONORfi  DE   BALZAC  131 

sacrifice  than  ever  Balzac's  was — so  miraculously, 
given  the  conditions,  was  Balzac's  to  escape  the  anti- 
climax. Method  and  system,  in  the  chronicle  of  the 
tribe  of  Rougon-Macquart,  an  economy  in  itself  cer- 
tainly of  the  rarest  and  most  interesting,  have  spread 
so  from  centre  to  circumference  that  they  have  ended 
by  being  almost  the  only  thing  we  feel.  And  then 
M.  Zola  has  survived  and  triumphed  in  his  lifetime, 
has  continued  and  lasted,  has  piled  up  and,  if  the 
remark  be  not  frivolous,  enjoyed  in  all  its  agrements 
the  reward  for  which  Balzac  toiled  and  sweated  in 
vain.  On  top  of  which  he  will  have  had  also  his 
literary  great-grandfather's  heroic  example  to  start 
from  and  profit  by,  the  positive  heritage  of  a  fils  de 
famille  to  enjoy,  spend,  save,  waste.  Balzac  had 
frankly  no  heritage  at  all  but  his  stiff  subject,  and  by 
way  of  model  not  even  in  any  direct  or  immediate 
manner  that  of  the  inner  light  and  kindly  admonition 
of  his  genius.  Nothing  adds  more  to  the  strangeness 
of  his  general  performance  than  his  having  failed  so 
long  to  find  his  inner  light,  groped  for  it  almost  ten 
years,  missed  it  again  and  again,  moved  straight  away 
from  it,  turned  his  back  on  it,  lived  in  fine  round  about 
it,  in  a  darkness  still  scarce  penetrable,  a  darkness  into 
which  we  peep  only  half  to  make  out  the  dreary  little 
waste  of  his  numerous  ceuvres  de  jeunesse.  To  M.  Zola 
was  vouchsafed  the  good  fortune  of  settling  down  to  the 
Rougon-Macquart  with  the  happiest  promptitude;  it 
was  as  if  time  for  one  look  about  him — and  I  say  it 
without  disparagement  to  the  reach  of  his  look — had 
sufficiently  served  his  purpose.  Balzac  moreover  might 
have  written  five  hundred  novels  without  our  feeling 
in  him  the  faintest  hint  of  the  breath  of  doom,  if  he 
had  only  been  comfortably  capable  of  conceiving  the 


132  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

short  cut  of  the  fashion  practised  by  others  under  his 
eyes.  As  Alexandre  Dumas  and  George  Sand,  illus- 
trious contemporaries,  cultivated  a  personal  life  and 
a  disinterested  consciousness  by  the  bushel,  having,  for 
their  easier  duration,  not  too  consistently  known,  as 
the  true  painter  knows  it,  the  obsession  of  the  thing  to 
be  done,  so  Balzac  was  condemned  by  his  constitution 
itself,  by  his  inveterately  seeing  this  "thing  to  be  done" 
as  part  and  parcel,  as  of  the  very  essence,  of  his  enter- 
prise. The  latter  existed  for  him,  as  the  process  worked 
and  hallucination  settled,  in  the  form,  and  the  form 
only,  of  the  thing  done,  and  not  in  any  hocus-pocus 
about  doing.  There  was  no  kindly  convenient  escape 
for  him  by  the  little  swinging  back-door  of  the  thing 
not  done.  He  desired — no  man  more — to  get  out  of 
his  obsession,  but  only  at  the  other  end,  that  is  by 
boring  through  it.  "How  then,  thus  deprived  of  the 
outer  air  almost  as  much  as  if  he  were  gouging  a  pas- 
sage for  a  railway  through  an  Alp,  did  he  live  ?"  is  the 
question  that  haunts  us — with  the  consequence  for 
the  most  part  of  promptly  meeting  its  fairly  tragic 
answer.  He  did  not  live — save  in  his  imagination,  or 
by  other  aid  than  he  could  find  there;  his  imagination 
was  all  his  experience;  he  had  provably  no  time  for 
the  real  thing.  This  brings  us  to  the  rich  if  simple 
truth  that  his  imagination  alone  did  the  business,  car- 
ried through  both  the  conception  and  the  execution — 
as  large  an  effort  and  as  proportionate  a  success,  in  all 
but  the  vulgar  sense,  as  the  faculty  when  equally 
handicapped  was  ever  concerned  in.  Handicapped  I 
say  because  this  interesting  fact  about  him,  with  the 
claim  it  makes,  rests  on  the  ground,  the  high  distinc- 
tion, that  more  than  all  the  rest  of  us  put  together  he 
went  in,  as  we  say,  for  detail,  circumstance  and  spec- 


HONORS   DE   BALZAC  133 

ification,  proposed  to  himself  all  the  connections  of 
every  part  of  his  matter  and  the  full  total  of  the  parts. 
The  whole  thing,  it  is  impossible  not  to  keep  repeating, 
was  what  he  deemed  treatable.  One  really  knows  in 
all  imaginative  literature  no  undertaking  to  compare 
with  it  for  courage,  good  faith  and  sublimity.  There, 
once  more,  was  the  necessity  that  rode  him  and  that 
places  him  apart  in  our  homage.  It  is  no  light  thing 
to  have  been  condemned  to  become  provably  sublime. 
And  looking  through,  or  trying  to,  at  what  is  beneath 
and  behind,  we  are  left  benevolently  uncertain  if  the 
predominant  quantity  be  audacity  or  innocence. 

It  is  of  course  inevitable  at  this  point  to  seem  to  hear 
the  colder  critic  promptly  take  us  up.  He  undertook 
the  whole  thing — oh  exactly,  the  ponderous  person  ! 
But  did  he  "do"  the  whole  thing,  if  you  please,  any 
more  than  sundry  others  of  fewer  pretensions  ?  The 
retort  to  this  it  can  only  be  a  positive  joy  to  make,  so 
high  a  note  instantly  sounds  as  an  effect  of  the  inquiry. 
Nothing  is  more  interesting  and  amusing  than  to  find 
one's  self  recognising  both  that  Balzac's  pretensions 
were  immense,  portentous,  and  that  yet,  taking  him 
— and  taking  them — altogether,  they  but  minister  in 
the  long  run  to  our  fondness.  They  affect  us  not  only 
as  the  endearing  eccentricities  of  a  person  we  greatly 
admire,  but  fairly  as  the  very  condition  of  his  having 
become  such  a  person.  We  take  them  thus  in  the  first 
place  for  the  very  terms  of  his  plan,  and  in  the  second 
for  a  part  of  that  high  robustness  and  that  general 
richness  of  nature  which  made  him  in  face  of  such  a 
project  believe  in  himself.  One  would  really  scarce 
have  liked  to  see  such  a  job  as  La  Comedie  Humaine 
tackled  without  swagger.  To  think  of  the  thing 


134  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

really  as  practicable  was  swagger,  and  of  the  very 
rarest  order.  So  to  think  assuredly  implied  pretensions, 
pretensions  that  risked  showing  as  monstrous  should 
the  enterprise  fail  to  succeed.  It  is  for  the  colder 
critic  to  take  the  trouble  to  make  out  that  of  the  two 
parties  to  it  the  body  of  pretension  remains  greater 
than  the  success.  One  may  put  it  moreover  at  the 
worst  for  him,  may  recognise  that  it  is  in  the  matter 
of  opinion  still  more  than  in  the  matter  of  knowledge 
that  Balzac  offers  himself  as  universally  competent. 
He  has  flights  of  judgment — on  subjects  the  most 
special  as  well  as  the  most  general — that  are  vertig- 
inous and  on  his  alighting  from  which  we  greet  him 
with  a  special  indulgence.  We  can  easily  imagine 
him  to  respond,  confessing  humorously — if  he  had  only 
time — to  such  a  benevolent  understanding  smile  as 
would  fain  hold  our  own  eyes  a  moment.  Then  it  is 
that  he  would  most  show  us  his  scheme  and  his  neces- 
sities and  how  in  operation  they  all  hang  together. 
Naturally  everything  about  everything,  though  how 
he  had  time  to  learn  it  is  the  last  thing  he  has  time  to 
tell  us;  which  matters  the  less,  moreover,  as  it  is  not 
over  the  question  of  his  knowledge  that  we  sociably 
invite  him,  as  it  were  (and  remembering  the  two  augurs 
behind  the  altar)  to  wink  at  us  for  a  sign.  His  con- 
victions it  is  that  are  his  great  pardonable  "swagger"; 
to  them  in  particular  I  refer  as  his  general  operative 
condition,  the  constituted  terms  of  his  experiment, 
and  not  less  as  his  consolation,  his  support,  his  amuse- 
ment by  the  way.  They  embrace  everything  in  the 
world — that  is  in  his  world  of  the  so  parti-coloured 
France  of  his  age:  religion,  morals,  politics,  economics, 
physics,  esthetics,  letters,  art,  science,  sociology,  every 
question  of  faith,  every  branch  of  research.  They 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  135 

represent  thus  his  equipment  of  ideas,  those  ideas  of 
which  it  will  never  do  for  a  man  who  aspires  to  con- 
stitute a  State  to  be  deprived.  He  must  take  them 
with  him  as  an  ambassador  extraordinary  takes  with 
him  secretaries,  uniforms,  stars  and  garters,  a  gilded 
coach  and  a  high  assurance.  Balzac's  opinions  are 
his  gilded  coach,  in  which  he  is  more  amused  than  any- 
thing else  to  feel  himself  riding,  but  which  is  indispen- 
sably concerned  in  getting  him  over  the  ground. 
What  more  inevitable  than  that  they  should  be  in- 
tensely Catholic,  intensely  monarchical,  intensely  sat- 
urated with  the  real  genius — as  between  1830  and  1848 
he  believed  it  to  be — of  the  French  character  and 
French  institutions  ? 

Nothing  is  happier  for  us  than  that  he  should  have 
enjoyed  his  outlook  before  the  first  half  of  the  century 
closed.  He  could  then  still  treat  his  subject  as  com- 
paratively homogeneous.  Any  country  could  have  a 
Revolution — every  country  had  had  one.  A  Resto- 
ration was  merely  what  a  revolution  involved,  and  the 
Empire  had  been  for  the  French  but  a  revolutionary 
incident,  in  addition  to  being  by  good  luck  for  the 
novelist  an  immensely  pictorial  one.  He  was  free 
therefore  to  arrange  the  background  of  the  comedy 
in  the  manner  that  seemed  to  him  best  to  suit  anything 
so  great;  in  the  manner  at  the  same  time  prescribed 
according  to  his  contention  by  the  noblest  traditions. 
The  church,  the  throne,  the  noblesse,  the  bourgeoisie, 
the  people,  the  peasantry,  all  in  their  order  and  each 
solidly  kept  in  it,  these  were  precious  things,  things 
his  superabundant  insistence  on  the  price  of  which  is 
what  I  refer  to  as  his  exuberance  of  opinion.  It  was 
a  luxury  for  more  reasons  than  one,  though  one, 


i36  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

presently  to  be  mentioned,  handsomely  predominates. 
The  meaning  of  that  exchange  of  intelligences  in  the 
rear  of  the  oracle  which  I  have  figured  for  him  with 
the  perceptive  friend  bears  simply  on  his  pleading 
guilty  to  the  purport  of  the  friend's  discrimination. 
The  point  the  latter  makes  with  him — a  beautiful 
cordial  critical  point — is  that  he  truly  cares  for  noth- 
ing in  the  world,  thank  goodness,  so  much  as  for  the 
passions  and  embroilments  of  men  and  women,  the 
free  play  of  character  and  the  sharp  revelation  of  type, 
all  the  real  stuff  of  drama  and  the  natural  food  of 
novelists.  Religion,  morals,  politics,  economics,  es- 
thetics would  be  thus,  as  systematic  matter,  very  well 
in  their  place,  but  quite  secondary  and  subservient. 
Balzac's  attitude  is  again  and  again  that  he  cares  for 
the  adventures  and  emotions  because,  as  his  last  word, 
he  cares  for  the  good  and  the  greatness  of  the  State— 
which  is  where  his  swagger,  with  a  whole  society  on  his 
hands,  comes  in.  What  we  on  our  side  in  a  thousand 
places  gratefully  feel  is  that  he  cares  for  his  monarchi- 
cal and  hierarchical  and  ecclesiastical  society  because 
it  rounds  itself  for  his  mind  into  the  most  congruous 
and  capacious  theatre  for  the  repertory  of  his  innu- 
merable comedians.  It  has  above  all,  for  a  painter 
abhorrent  of  the  superficial,  the  inestimable  benefit 
of  the  accumulated,  of  strong  marks  and  fine  shades, 
contrasts  and  complications.  There  had  certainly 
been  since  1789  dispersals  and  confusions  enough,  but 
the  thick  tradition,  no  more  at  the  most  than  half 
smothered,  lay  under  them  all.  So  the  whole  of  his 
faith  and  no  small  part  of  his  working  omniscience 
were  neither  more  nor  less  than  that  historic  sense 
which  I  have  spoken  of  as  the  spur  of  his  invention 
and  which  he  possessed  as  no  other  novelist  has  done. 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  137 

We  immediately  feel  that  to  name  it  in  connection 
with  him  is  to  answer  every  question  he  suggests  and 
to  account  for  each  of  his  idiosyncrasies  in  turn.  The 
novel,  the  tale,  however  brief,  the  passage,  the  sentence 
by  itself,  the  situation,  the  person,  the  place,  the  mo- 
tive exposed,  the  speech  reported — these  things  were 
in  his  view  history,  with  the  absoluteness  and  the 
dignity  of  history.  This  is  the  source  both  of  his 
weight  and  of  his  wealth.  What  is  the  historic  sense 
after  all  but  animated,  but  impassioned  knowledge 
seeking  to  enlarge  itself?  I  have  said  that  his  imag- 
ination did  the  whole  thing,  no  other  explanation — no 
reckoning  of  the  possibilities  of  personal  saturation- 
meeting  the  mysteries  of  the  case.  Therefore  his 
imagination  achieved  the  miracle  of  absolutely  resolv- 
ing itself  into  multifarious  knowledge.  Since  history 
proceeds  by  documents  he  constructed,  as  he  needed 
them,  the  documents  too — fictive  sources  that  imitated 
the  actual  to  the  life.  It  was  of  course  a  terrible  bus- 
iness, but  at  least  in  the  light  of  it  his  claims  to  creator- 
ship  are  justified — which  is  what  was  to  be  shown. 

IV 

It  is  very  well  even  in  the  sketchiest  attempt  at  a 
portrait  of  his  genius  to  try  to  take  particulars  in  their 
order:  one  peeps  over  the  shoulder  of  another  at  the 
moment  we  get  a  feature  into  focus.  The  loud  appeal 
not  to  be  left  out  prevails  among  them  all,  and  certainly 
with  the  excuse  that  each  as  we  fix  it  seems  to  fall 
most  into  the  picture.  I  have  so  indulged  myself  as 
to  his  general  air  that  I  find  a  whole  list  of  vivid  con- 
tributive  marks  almost  left  on  my  hands.  Such  a  list, 
in  any  study  of  Balzac,  is  delightful  for  intimate 


138  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

edification  as  well  as  for  the  fine  humour  of  the  thing; 
we  proceed  from  one  of  the  items  of  his  breathing 
physiognomy  to  the  other  with  quite  the  same  sense 
of  life,  the  same  active  curiosity,  with  which  we  push 
our  way  through  the  thick  undergrowth  of  one  of  the 
novels.  The  difficulty  is  really  that  the  special  point 
for  which  we  at  the  moment  observe  him  melts  into 
all  the  other  points,  is  swallowed  up  before  our  eyes  in 
the  formidable  mass.  The  French  apply  the  happiest 
term  to  certain  characters  when  they  speak  of  them 
as  entiers,  and  if  the  word  had  been  invented  for  Balzac 
it  could  scarce  better  have  expressed  him.  He  is 
"entire"  as  was  never  a  man  of  his  craft;  he  moves 
always  in  his  mass;  wherever  we  find  him  we  find  him 
in  force;  whatever  touch  he  applies  he  applies  it  with 
his  whole  apparatus.  He  is  like  an  army  gathered  to 
besiege  a  cottage  equally  with  a  city,  and  living  vo- 
raciously in  either  case  on  all  the  country  about.  It 
may  well  be,  at  any  rate,  that  his  infatuation  with  the 
idea  of  the  social,  the  practical  primacy  of  "the  sex" 
is  the  article  at  the  top  of  one's  list;  there  could  cer- 
tainly be  no  better  occasion  than  this  of  a  rich  reissue 
of  the  "Deux  Jeunes  Mariees"  for  placing  it  there  at 
a  venture.  Here  indeed  precisely  we  get  a  sharp  ex- 
ample of  the  way  in  which,  as  I  have  just  said,  a  capital 
illustration  of  one  of  his  sides  becomes,  just  as  we  take 
it  up,  a  capital  illustration  of  another.  The  corre- 
spondence of  Louise  de  Chaulieu  and  Renee  de  Mau- 
combe  is  in  fact  one  of  those  cases  that  light  up  with 
a  great  golden  glow  all  his  parts  at  once.  We  needn't 
mean  by  this  that  such  parts  are  themselves  absolutely 
all  golden — given  the  amount  of  tinsel  for  instance  in 
his  view,  supereminent,  transcendent  here,  of  the  old 
families  and  the  great  ladies.  What  we  do  convey, 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  139 

however,  is  that  his  creative  temperament  finds  in  such 
data  as  these  one  of  its  best  occasions  for  shining  out. 
Again  we  fondly  recognise  his  splendid,  his  attaching 
swagger — that  of  a  "bounder"  of  genius  and  of  feeling; 
again  we  see  how,  with  opportunity,  its  elements  may 
vibrate  into  a  perfect  ecstasy  of  creation. 

Why  shouldn't  a  man  swagger,  he  treats  us  to  the 
diversion  of  asking  ourselves,  who  has  created  from  top 
to  toe  the  most  brilliant,  the  most  historic,  the  most 
insolent,  above  all  the  most  detailed  and  discriminated 
of  aristocracies  ?  Balzac  carried  the  uppermost  class 
of  his  comedy,  from  the  princes,  dukes,  and  unspeak- 
able duchesses  down  to  his  poor  barons  de  province, 
about  in  his  pocket  as  he  might  have  carried  a  tolerably 
befingered  pack  of  cards,  to  deal  them  about  with  a 
flourish  of  the  highest  authority  whenever  there  was 
the  chance  of  a  game.  He  knew  them  up  and  down 
and  in  and  out,  their  arms,  infallibly  supplied,  their 
quarterings,  pedigrees,  services,  intermarriages,  rela- 
tionships, ramifications  and  other  enthralling  attributes. 
This  indeed  is  comparatively  simple  learning;  the  real 
wonder  is  rather  when  we  linger  on  the  ground  of  the 
patrician  consciousness  itself,  the  innermost,  the 
esoteric,  the  spirit,  temper,  tone — tone  above  all — of 
the  titled  and  the  proud.  The  questions  multiply  for 
every  scene  of  the  corned}';  there  is  no  one  who  makes 
us  walk  in  such  a  cloud  of  them.  The  clouds  else- 
where, in  comparison,  are  at  best  of  questions  not 
worth  asking.  Was  the  patrician  consciousness  that 
figured  as  our  author's  model  so  splendidly  fatuous  as 
he — almost  without  irony,  often  in  fact  with  a  certain 
poetic  sympathy — everywhere  represents  it  ?  His  im- 
agination lives  in  it,  breathes  its  scented  air,  swallows 


140  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

this  element  with  the  smack  of  the  lips  of  the  con- 
noisseur; but  I  feel  that  we  never  know,  even  to  the 
end,  whether  he  be  here  directly  historic  or  only  quite 
misguidedly  romantic.  The  romantic  side  of  him  has 
the  extent  of  all  the  others;  it  represents  in  the  oddest 
manner  his  escape  from  the  walled  and  roofed  struc- 
ture into  which  he  had  built  himself — his  longing  for 
the  vaguely-felt  outside  and  as  much  as  might  be  of  the 
rest  of  the  globe.  But  it  is  characteristic  of  him  that 
the  most  he  could  do  for  this  relief  was  to  bring  the 
fantastic  into  the  circle  and  fit  it  somehow  to  his  con- 
ditions. Was  his  tone  for  the  duchess,  the  marquise 
but  the  imported  fantastic,  one  of  those  smashes  of 
the  window-pane  of  the  real  that  reactions  sometimes 
produce  even  in  the  stubborn  ?  or  are  we  to  take  it  as 
observed,  as  really  reported,  as,  for  all  its  difference 
from  our  notion  of  the  natural — and,  quite  as  much, 
of  the  artificial — in  another  and  happier  strain  of  man- 
ners, substantially  true?  The  whole  episode,  in  "Les 
Illusions  Perdues,"  of  Madame  de  Bargeton's  "chuck- 
ing" Lucien  de  Rubempre,  on  reaching  Paris  with 
him,  under  pressure  of  Madame  d'Espard's  shock- 
ability  as  to  his  coat  and  trousers  and  other  such  mat- 
ters, is  either  a  magnificent  lurid  document  or  the 
baseless  fabric  of  a  vision.  The  great  wonder  is  that, 
as  I  rejoice  to  put  it,  we  can  never  really  discover 
which,  and  that  we  feel  as  we  read  that  we  can't,  and 
that  we  suffer  at  the  hands  of  no  other  author  this  par- 
ticular helplessness  of  immersion.  It  is  done — we  are 
always  thrown  back  on  that;  we  can't  get  out  of  it; 
all  we  can  do  is  to  say  that  the  true  itself  can't  be  more 
than  done  and  that  if  the  false  in  this  way  equals  it 
we  must  give  up  looking  for  the  difference.  Alone 
among  novelists  Balzac  has  the  secret  of  an  insistence 
that  somehow  makes  the  difference  nought.  He 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  141 

warms  his  facts  into  life — as  witness  the  certainty  that 
the  episode  I  just  cited  has  absolutely  as  much  of  that 
property  as  if  perfect  matching  had  been  achieved. 
If  the  great  ladies  in  question  didn't  behave,  wouldn't, 
couldn't  have  behaved,  like  a  pair  of  nervous  snobs, 
why  so  much  the  worse,  we  say  to  ourselves,  for  the 
great  ladies  in  question.  We  know  them  so — they  owe 
their  being  to  our  so  seeing  them;  whereas  we  never 
can  tell  ourselves  how  we  should  otherwise  have  known 
them  or  what  quantity  of  being  they  would  on  a  dif- 
ferent footing  have  been  able  to  put  forth. 

The  case  is  the  same  with  Louise  de  Chaulieu,  who 
besides  coming  out  of  her  convent  school,  as  a  quite 
young  thing,  with  an  amount  of  sophistication  that 
would  have  chilled  the  heart  of  a  horse-dealer,  exhales 
—and  to  her  familiar  friend,  a  young  person  of  a  sup- 
posedly equal  breeding — an  extravagance  of  com- 
placency in  her  "social  position"  that  makes  us  rub 
our  eyes.  Whereupon  after  a  little  the  same  phenom- 
enon occurs;  we  swallow  her  bragging,  against  our 
better  reason,  or  at  any  rate  against  our  startled  sense, 
under  coercion  of  the  total  intensity.  We  do  more 
than  this,  we  cease  to  care  for  the  question,  which 
loses  itself  in  the  hot  fusion  of  the  whole  picture.  He 
has  "gone  for"  his  subject,  in  the  vulgar  phrase,  with 
an  avidity  that  makes  the  attack  of  his  most  eminent 
rivals  affect  us  as  the  intercourse  between  introduced 
indifferences  at  a  dull  evening  party.  He  squeezes  it 
till  it  cries  out,  we  hardly  know  whether  for  pleasure 
or  pain.  In  the  case  before  us  for  example — without 
wandering  from  book  to  book,  impossible  here,  I  make 
the  most  of  the  ground  already  broken — he  has  seen  at 
once  that  the  state  of  marriage  itself,  sounded  to  its 
depths,  is,  in  the  connection,  his  real  theme.  He  sees 


142  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

it  of  course  in  the  conditions  that  exist  for  him,  but  he 
weighs  it  to  the  last  ounce,  feels  it  in  all  its  dimensions, 
as  well  as  in  all  his  own,  and  would  scorn  to  take  refuge 
in  any  engaging  side-issue.  He  gets,  for  further  in- 
tensity, into  the  very  skin  of  his  jeunes  mariees — into 
each  alternately,  as  they  are  different  enough;  so  that, 
to  repeat  again,  any  other  mode  of  representing  women, 
or  of  representing  anybody,  becomes,  in  juxtaposition, 
a  thing  so  void  of  the  active  contortions  of  truth 
as  to  be  comparatively  wooden.  He  bears  children 
with  Madame  de  1'Estorade,  knows  intimately  how  she 
suffers  for  them,  and  not  less  intimately  how  her  cor- 
respondent suffers,  as  well  as  enjoys,  without  them. 
Big  as  he  is  he  makes  himself  small  to  be  handled  by 
her  with  young  maternal  passion  and  positively  to 
handle  her  in  turn  with  infantile  innocence.  These 
things  are  the  very  flourishes,  the  little  technical 
amusements  of  his  penetrating  power.  But  it  is  doubt- 
less in  his  hand  for  such  a  matter  as  the  jealous  passion 
of  Louise  de  Chaulieu,  the  free  play  of  her  intelligence 
and  the  almost  beautiful  good  faith  of  her  egotism, 
that  he  is  most  individual.  It  is  one  of  the  neatest 
examples  of  his  extraordinary  leading  gift,  his  art — 
which  is  really  moreover  not  an  art — of  working  the 
exhibition  of  a  given  character  up  to  intensity.  I  say 
it  is  not  an  art  because  it  acts  for  us  rather  as  a  hunger 
on  the  part  of  his  nature  to  take  on  in  all  freedom 
another  nature — take  it  by  a  direct  process  of  the 
senses.  Art  is  for  the  mass  of  us  who  have  only  the 
process  of  art,  comparatively  so  stiff.  The  thing 
amounts  with  him  to  a  kind  of  shameless  personal, 
physical,  not  merely  intellectual,  duality — the  very 
spirit  and  secret  of  transmigration. 


HONORE  DE  BALZAC 

1913 

IT  is  a  pleasure  to  meet  M.  Emile  Faguet1  on  the  same 
ground  of  mastered  critical  method  and  in  the  same 
air  of  cool  deliberation  and  conclusion  that  so  favoured 
his  excellent  study  of  Flaubert  in  the  rich  series  to 
which  the  present  volume  belongs.  It  was  worth 
while  waiting  these  many  years  for  a  Balzac  to  get  it 
at  last  from  a  hand  of  so  firm  a  grip,  if  not  quite  of  the 
very  finest  manipulative  instinct.  It  can  scarce  ever 
be  said  of  M.  Faguet  that  he  tends  to  play  with  a 
subject,  at  least  a  literary  one;  but  nobody  is  better 
for  circling  his  theme  in  sound  and  easy  pedestrian 
fashion,  for  taking  up  each  of  its  aspects  in  order,  for 
a  sense,  above  all,  of  the  order  in  which  they  should 
be  taken,  and  for  then,  after  doing  them  successively 
justice,  reaching  the  point  from  which  they  appear 
to  melt  together.  He  thus  gives  us  one  of  those  lit- 
erary portraits  the  tradition  of  which,  so  far  at  least  as 
they  are  the  fruit  of  method,  has  continued  scantily 
to  flourish  among  ourselves.  We  cannot  help  thinking 
indeed  that  an  ideally  authoritative  portrait  of  Balzac 
would  be  the  work  of  some  pondering  painter  able  to 
measure  the  great  man's  bequest  a  little  more  from 
within  or  by  a  coincidence  of  special  faculty,  or  that 
in  other  words  the  particular  initiation  and  fellow- 

1  Balzac.     Par  Emile   Faguet,   de   I'Academie   Franfaise.     Les   Grands 
Ecrivains  Fran9ais.     Paris,  Hachette,  1913. 

143 


144  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

feeling  of  some  like — that  is  not  too  unlike — imagina- 
tive projector  as  well  are  rather  wanted  here  to  warm 
and  colour  the  critical  truth  to  the  right  glow  of  appre- 
ciation. Which  comes  to  saying,  we  quite  acknowledge, 
that  a  "tribute"  to  Balzac,  of  however  embracing  an 
intention,  may  still  strike  us  as  partly  unachieved  if 
we  fail  to  catch  yearning  and  shining  through  it,  like 
a  motive  in  a  musical  mixture  or  a  thread  of  gold  in  a 
piece  of  close  weaving,  the  all  but  overriding  sympathy 
of  novelist  with  novelist.  M.  Faguet's  intelligence  at 
any  rate  sweeps  his  ground  clear  of  the  anecdotal, 
the  question-begging  reference  to  odds  and  ends  of 
the  personal  and  superficial,  in  a  single  short  chapter, 
and,  having  got  so  promptly  over  this  second  line  of 
defence,  attacks  at  once  the  issue  of  his  author's  gen- 
eral ideas — matters  apt  to  be,  in  any  group  of  con- 
tributors to  a  "series"  of  our  own,  exactly  what  the 
contributor  most  shirks  considering. 

It  is  true  that  few  writers,  and  especially  few  novel- 
ists, bring  up  that  question  with  anything  like  the 
gross  assurance  and  systematic  confidence  of  Balzac, 
who  clearly  took  for  involved  in  his  plan  of  a  complete 
picture  of  the  manners  and  aspects  of  his  country 
and  his  period  that  he  should  have  his  confident  "say" 
about  as  many  things  as  possible,  and  who,  through- 
out his  immense  work,  appears  never  for  an  instant  or 
in  any  connection  to  flinch  from  that  complacency. 
Here  it  is  easy  to  await  him,  waylay  him  and  catch 
him  in  the  act,  with  the  consequence,  for  the  most 
part,  of  our  having  to  recognise  almost  with  compas- 
sion the  disparity  between  the  author  of  "La  Cousine 
Bette"  exercising  his  genius,  as  Matthew  Arnold  said 
of  Ruskin,  in  making  a  like  distinction,  and  the  same 


HONORfi  DE  BALZAC  145 

writer  taking  on  a  character  not  in  the  least  really 
rooted  in  that  soil.  The  fact  none  the  less  than  his 
generalising  remains  throughout  so  markedly  inferior  to 
his  particularising — which  latter  element  and  very  es- 
sence of  the  novelist's  art  it  was  his  greatness  to  carry 
further  and  apply  more  consistently  than  any  member 
of  the  craft,  without  exception,  has  felt  the  impulse, 
to  say  nothing  of  finding  the  way,  to  do — by  no  means 
wholly  destroys  the  interest  of  the  habit  itself  or  re- 
lieves us  of  a  due  attention  to  it;  so  characteristic  and 
significant,  so  suggestive  even  of  his  special  force, 
though  in  a  manner  indirect,  are  the  very  folds  and 
redundancies  of  this  philosopher's  robe  that  flaps 
about  his  feet  and  drags  along  the  ground  like  an 
assumed  official  train.  The  interest  here — where  it 
is  exactly  that  a  whole  face  of  his  undertaking  would 
be  most  illumined  for  the  fellow-artist  we  imagine 
trying  to  exhibit  him — depends  much  less  on  what 
his  reflection  and  opinion,  his  irrepressible  obiter  dicta 
and  monstrous  suffisances  of  judgment  may  be,  than 
on  the  part  played  in  his  scheme  by  his  holding  himself 
ready  at  every  turn  and  at  such  short  notice  to  judge. 
For  this  latter  fact  probably  lights  up  more  than  any 
other  his  conception  of  the  range  of  the  novel,  the 
fashion  after  which,  in  his  hands,  it  had  been  felt  as  an 
all-inclusive  form,  a  form  without  rift  or  leak,  a  tight 
mould,  literally,  into  which  everything  relevant  to  a 
consideration  of  the  society  surrounding  him — and 
the  less  relevant  unfortunately,  as  well  as  the  more 
—might  be  poured  in  a  stream  of  increasing  consis- 
tency, the  underlapping  subject  stretched,  all  so  for- 
midably, to  its  own  constituted  edge  and  the  com- 
pound appointed  to  reproduce,  as  in  finest  and  subtlest 
relief,  its  every  minutest  feature,  overlying  and  corre- 


146  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

spending  with  it  all  round  to  the  loss  of  no  fraction  of 
an  inch. 

It  is  thus  the  painter's  aspiring  and  rejoicing  con- 
sciousness of  the  great  square  swarming  picture,  the 
picture  of  France  from  side  to  side  and  from  top  to 
bottom,  which  he  proposes  to  copy — unless  we  see 
the  collective  quantity  rather  as  the  vast  primary 
model  or  sitter  that  he  is  unprecedentedly  to  portray, 
it  is  this  that,  rendering  him  enviable  in  proportion 
to  his  audacity  and  his  presumption,  gives  a  dignity 
to  everything  that  makes  the  consciousness  whole. 
The  result  is  a  state  of  possession  of  his  material  unlike 
that  of  any  other  teller  of  tales  whatever  about  a  cir- 
cumjacent world,  and  the  process  of  his  gain  of  which 
opens  up  well-nigh  the  first  of  those  more  or  less  baf- 
fling questions,  parts  indeed  of  the  great  question  of 
the  economic  rule,  the  practical  secret,  of  his  activity, 
that  beset  us  as  soon  as  we  study  him.  To  fit  what  he 
was  and  what  he  did,  that  is  the  measure  of  how  he 
used  himself  and  how  he  used  every  one  and  every- 
thing else,  into  his  after  all  so  brief  career  (for  twenty 
years  cover  the  really  productive  term  of  it)  is  for 
ourselves,  we  confess,  to  renounce  any  other  solution 
than  that  of  his  having  proceeded  by  a  sense  for  facts, 
the  multitudinous  facts  of  the  scene  about  him,  that 
somehow  involved  a  preliminary,  a  pre-experiential 
inspiration,  a  straightness  of  intuition  truly  impossible 
to  give  an  account  of  and  the  like  of  which  had  never 
before  been  shown.  He  had  not  to  learn  things  in 
order  to  know  them;  and  even  though  he  multiplied 
himself  in  more  ways  than  we  can  reckon  up,  going 
hither  and  thither  geographically,  leading  his  life  with 
violence,  as  it  were,  though  always  with  intention,  and 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  147 

wasting  almost  nothing  that  had  ever  touched  him, 
the  natural  man,  the  baptised  and  registered  Honore, 
let  loose  with  harsh  promptitude  upon  a  world  formed 
from  the  first  moment  to  excite  his  voracity,  can  only 
have  been  all  the  exploiting  agent,  the  pushing  inquirer, 
the  infallible  appraiser,  the  subject  of  an  arriere-pensee 
as  merciless,  in  spite  of  being  otherwise  genial,  as  the 
black  care  riding  behind  the  horseman.  There  was 
thus  left  over  for  him  less  of  mere  human  looseness, 
of  mere  emotion,  of  mere  naturalness,  or  of  any  cu- 
riosity whatever,  that  didn't  "pay" — and  the  extent 
to  which  he  liked  things  to  pay,  to  see  them,  think  of 
them,  and  describe  them  as  prodigiously  paying,  is 
not  to  be  expressed — than  probably  marks  any  re- 
corded relation  between  author  and  subject  as  we 
know  each  of  these  terms. 

So  it  comes  that  his  mastership  of  whatever  given 
identity  might  be  in  question,  and  much  more  of  the 
general  identity  of  his  rounded  (for  the  artistic  vision), 
his  compact  and  containing  France,  the  fixed,  felt 
frame  to  him  of  the  vividest  items  and  richest  char- 
acteristics of  human  life,  can  really  not  be  thought  of 
as  a  matter  of  degrees  of  confidence,  as  acquired  or 
built  up  or  cumbered  with  verifying  fears.  He  was 
the  given  identity  and,  on  the  faintest  shade  of  a  hint 
about  it  caught  up,  became  one  with  it  and  lived  it— 
this  in  the  only  way  in  which  he  could  live,  anywhere 
or  at  any  time:  which  was  by  losing  himself  in  its 
relation  to  his  need  or  to  what  we  call  his  voracity. 
Just  so  his  mind,  his  power  of  apprehension,  worked 
naturally  in  the  interest  of  a  society  disclosed  to  that 
appetite;  on  the  mere  approach  to  the  display  he  in- 
haled information,  he  recognised  himself  as  what  he 


148  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

might  best  be  known  for,  an  historian  unprecedented, 
an  historian  documented  as  none  had  not  only  ever 
been,  but  had  ever  dreamed  of  being — and  even  if  the 
method  of  his  documentation  can  leave  us  for  the  most 
part  but  wondering.  The  method  of  his  use  of  it,  or 
of  a  portion  of  it,  we  more  or  less  analyse  and  measure; 
but  the  wealth  of  his  provision  or  outfit  itself,  the 
crammed  store  of  his  categories  and  cadres,  leaves  us 
the  more  stupefied  as  we  feel  it  to  have  been  honestly 
come  by.  All  this  is  what  it  is  impossible  not  to  regard 
as  in  itself  a  fundamental  felicity  such  as  no  confrere 
had  known;  so  far,  indeed,  as  Balzac  suffered  con- 
freres or  as  the  very  nature  of  his  faculty  could  be 
thought  of  for  them.  M.  Brunetiere's  monograph  of 
some  years  ago,  which  is  but  a  couple  of  degrees  less 
weighty,  to  our  sense,  than  this  of  M.  Faguet  before  us, 
justly  notes  that,  whatever  other  felicity  may  have 
graced  the  exercise  of  such  a  genius,  for  instance,  as 
that  rare  contemporary  George  Sand,  she  was  reduced 
well-nigh  altogether  to  drawing  upon  resources  and 
enjoying  advantages  comparatively  vague  and  unas- 
sured. She  had  of  course  in  a  manner  her  special  re- 
source and  particular  advantage,  which  consisted,  so 
to  speak,  in  a  finer  feeling  about  what  she  did  possess 
and  could  treat  of  with  authority,  and  particularly  in 
a  finer  command  of  the  terms  of  expression,  than  any 
involved  in  Balzac's  "happier"  example.  But  her 
almost  fatal  weakness  as  a  novelist — an  exponent  of 
the  art  who  has  waned  exactly  as,  for  our  general 
long-drawn  appreciation,  Balzac  has  waxed — comes 
from  her  having  had  to  throw  herself  upon  ground 
that  no  order  governed,  no  frame,  as  we  have  said, 
enclosed,  and  no  safety  attended;  safety  of  the  sort, 
we  mean,  the  safety  of  the  constitutive,  illustrative 


HONORS   DE   BALZAC  149 

fact  among  facts,  which  we  find  in  her  rival  as  a  warm 
socialised  air,  an  element  supremely  assimilable. 

It  may  freely  be  pronounced  interesting  that 
whereas,  in  her  instinct  for  her  highest  security,  she 
threw  herself  upon  the  consideration  of  love  as  the 
type  attraction  or  most  representable  thing  in  the 
human  scene,  so,  assuredly,  no  student  of  that  field 
has,  in  proportion  to  the  thoroughness  of  his  study, 
felt  he  could  afford  to  subordinate  or  almost  even  to 
neglect  it  to  anything  like  the  tune  in  which  we  see  it 
put  and  kept  in  its  place  through  the  parts  of  the 
Comedie  Humaine  that  most  count.  If  this  passion 
but  too  often  exhales  a  tepid  breath  in  much  other 
fiction — much  other  of  ours  at  least — that  is  apt  to 
come  decidedly  less  from  the  writer's  sense  of  pro- 
portion than  from  his  failure  of  art,  or  in  other  words 
of  intensity.  It  is  rarely  absent  by  intention  or  by 
intelligence,  it  is  pretty  well  always  there  as  the  theo- 
retic principal  thing — any  difference  from  writer  to 
writer  being  mostly  in  the  power  to  put  the  principal 
thing  effectively  forward.  It  figures  as  a  pressing,  an 
indispensable  even  if  a  perfunctory  motive,  for  example, 
in  every  situation  devised  by  Walter  Scott;  the  case 
being  simply  that  if  it  doesn't  in  fact  attractively 
occupy  the  foreground  this  is  because  his  hand  has  had 
so  native,  so  much  greater,  an  ease  for  other  parts  of 
the  picture.  What  makes  Balzac  so  pre-eminent  and 
exemplary  that  he  was  to  leave  the  novel  a  far  other  and 
a  vastly  more  capacious  and  significant  affair  than  he 
found  it,  is  his  having  felt  his  fellow-creatures  (almost 
altogether  for  him  his  contemporaries)  as  quite  failing 
of  reality,  as  swimming  in  the  vague  and  the  void  and 
the  abstract,  unless  their  social  conditions,  to  the  last 


i5o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

particular,  their  generative  and  contributive  circum- 
stances, of  every  discernible  sort,  enter  for  all  these 
are  "worth"  into  his  representative  attempt.  This 
great  compound  of  the  total  looked  into  and  starting 
up  in  its  element,  as  it  always  does,  to  meet  the  eye 
of  genius  and  patience  half  way,  bristled  for  him  with 
all  its  branching  connections,  those  thanks  to  which 
any  figure  could  be  a  figure  but  by  showing  for  endlessly 
entangled  in  them. 

So  it  was  then  that  his  huge  felicity,  to  re-empha- 
sise our  term,  was  in  his  state  of  circulating  where 
recognitions  and  identifications  didn't  so  much  await 
as  rejoicingly  assault  him,  having  never  yet  in  all  the 
world,  grudged  or  at  the  best  suspected  feeders  as  they 
were  at  the  board  where  sentiment  occupied  the  head, 
felt  themselves  so  finely  important  or  subject  to  such  a 
worried  intention.  They  hung  over  a  scene  as  to  which 
it  was  one  of  the  forces  of  his  inspiration  that  his- 
tory had  lately  been  there  at  work,  with  incomparable 
energy  and  inimitable  art,  to  pile  one  upon  another, 
not  to  say  squeeze  and  dovetail  violently  into  each 
other,  after  such  a  fashion  as  might  defy  competition 
anywhere,  her  successive  deposits  and  layers  of  form 
and  order,  her  restless  determinations  of  appearance 
—so  like  those  of  the  different  "states"  of  an  engraver's 
impression;  all  to  an  effect  which  should  have  con- 
stituted, as  by  a  miracle  of  coincidence  it  did,  the 
paradise  of  an  extraordinary  observer.  Balzac  lived 
accordingly,  extraordinary  since  he  was,  in  an  earthly 
heaven  so  near  perfect  for  his  kind  of  vision  that  he 
could  have  come  at  no  moment  more  conceivably  blest 
to  him.  The  later  part  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
with  the  Revolution,  the  Empire  and  the  Restoration, 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  151 

had  inimitably  conspired  together  to  scatter  abroad 
their  separate  marks  and  stigmas,  their  separate  trails 
of  character  and  physiognomic  hits — for  which  advan- 
tage he  might  have  arrived  too  late,  as  his  hapless  suc- 
cessors, even  his  more  or  less  direct  imitators,  visibly 
have  done.  The  fatal  fusions  and  uniformities  in- 
flicted on  our  newer  generations,  the  running  together 
of  all  the  differences  of  form  and  tone,  the  ruinous 
liquefying  wash  of  the  great  industrial  brush  over  the 
old  conditions  of  contrast  and  colour,  doubtless  still 
have  left  the  painter  of  manners  much  to  do,  but  have 
ground  him  down  to  the  sad  fact  that  his  ideals  of  dif- 
ferentiation, those  inherent  oppositions  from  type  to 
type,  in  which  drama  most  naturally  resides,  have 
well-nigh  perished.  They  pant  for  life  in  a  hostile  air; 
and  we  may  surely  say  that  their  last  successful  strug- 
gle, their  last  bright  resistance  to  eclipse  among  our- 
selves, was  in  their  feverish  dance  to  the  great  fiddling 
of  Dickens.  Dickens  made  them  dance,  we  seem  to 
see,  caper  and  kick  their  heels,  wave  their  arms,  and 
above  all  agitate  their  features,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  he  couldn't  make  them  stand  or  sit  at  once  quietly 
and  expressively,  couldn't  make  them  look  straight  out 
as  for  themselves — quite  in  fact  as  through  his  not 
daring  to,  not  feeling  he  could  afford  to,  in  a  changing 
hour  when  ambiguities  and  the  wavering  line,  droll 
and  "dodgy"  dazzlements  and  the  possibly  undetected 
factitious  alone,  might  be  trusted  to  keep  him  right 
with  an  incredibly  uncritical  public,  a  public  blind  to 
the  difference  between  a  shade  and  a  patch. 

Balzac  on  the  other  hand,  born  as  we  have  seen  to 
confidence,  the  tonic  air  of  his  paradise,  might  make 
character,  in  the  sense  in  which  we  use  it,  that  of  the 


iS2  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

element  exposable  to  the  closest  verification,  sit  or 
stand  for  its  "likeness"  as  still  as  ever  it  would.  It  is 
true  that  he  could,  as  he  often  did,  resort  to  fond  ex- 
travagance, since  he  was  apt  at  his  worst  to  plunge 
into  agitation  for  mere  agitation's  sake — which  is  a 
course  that,  by  any  turn,  may  cast  the  plunger  on  the 
barrenest  strand.  But  he  is  at  his  best  when  the  con- 
ditions, the  whole  complex  of  subdivisible  form  and 
pressure,  are  virtually  themselves  the  situation,  the 
action  and  the  interest,  or  in  other  words  when  these 
things  exhaust  themselves,  as  it  were,  in  expressing 
the  persons  we  are  concerned  with,  agents  and  victims 
alike,  and  when  by  such  vivified  figures,  whether  vic- 
tims or  agents,  they  are  themselves  completely  ex- 
pressed. The  three  distinguished  critics  who  have 
best  studied  him,  Taine,  Brunetiere  and  now  (as  well 
as  before  this)  M.  Faguet — the  first  the  most  eloquent 
but  the  loosest,  and  the  last  the  closest  even  if  the 
dryest — are  in  agreement  indeed  as  to  the  vast  quantity 
of  waste  in  him,  inevitably  judging  the  romanticist  as 
whom  he  so  frequently,  speculatively,  desperately 
paraded  altogether  inferior  to  the  realist  whose  func- 
tion he  could  still  repeatedly  and  richly  and  for  his 
greater  glory  exercise.  This  estimate  of  his  partic- 
ularly greater  glory  is  of  a  truth  not  wholly  shared  by 
M.  Taine;  but  the  three  are  virtually  at  one,  where 
we  of  course  join  them,  or  rather  go  further  than  they, 
as  to  the  enviability,  so  again  to  call  it  (and  by  which  we 
mean  the  matchless  freedom  of  play),  of  his  harvest- 
ing sense  when  he  gave  himself  up  in  fullest  measure 
to  his  apprehension  of  the  dense  wholeness  of  reality. 
It  was  this  that  led  him  on  and  kept  him  true  to  that 
happily  largest  side  of  his  labour  by  which  he  must 
massively  live;  just  as  it  is  this,  the  breath  of  his  real 


HONORfi  DE  BALZAC  153 

geniality,  when  every  abatement  is  made,  that  stirs 
to  loyalty  those  who  under  his  example  also  take  his 
direction  and  find  their  joy  in  watching  him  thoroughly 
at  work.  We  see  then  how,  when  social  character 
and  evolved  type  are  the  prize  to  be  grasped,  the  facts 
of  observation  and  certification,  unrestingly  social  and 
historic  too,  that  form  and  fondle  and  retouch  it, 
never  relaxing  their  action,  are  so  easily  and  blessedly 
absolute  to  him  that  this  is  what  we  mean  by  their 
virtue. 

When  there  were  enough  of  these  quantities  and 
qualities  flowering  into  the  definite  and  the  absolute 
for  him  to  feed  on,  feed  if  not  to  satiety  at  least  to  the 
largest  loosening  of  his  intellectual  belt,  there  were 
so  many  that  we  may  even  fall  in  with  most  of  M. 
Faguet's  discriminations  and  reserves  about  him  and 
yet  find  his  edifice  rest  on  proportioned  foundations. 
For  it  is  his  assimilation  of  things  and  things,  of  his 
store  of  them  and  of  the  right  ones,  the  right  for  repre- 
sentation, that  leaves  his  general  image,  even  with 
great  chunks  of  surface  surgically,  that  is  critically, 
removed,  still  coherent  and  erect.  There  are  mo- 
ments when  M.  Faguet — most  surgical  he  ! — seems  to 
threaten  to  remove  so  much  that  we  ask  ourselves  in 
wonder  what  may  be  left;  but  no  removal  matters 
while  the  principle  of  observation  animating  the  mass 
is  left  unattacked.  Our  present  critic  for  instance  is 
"down" — very  understandingly  down  as  seems  to  us 
— on  some  of  the  sides  of  his  author's  rich  temper- 
amental vulgarity;  which  is  accompanied  on  those 
sides  by  want  of  taste,  want  of  wit,  want  of  style,  want 
of  knowledge  of  ever  so  many  parts  of  the  general  sub- 
ject, too  precipitately  proposed,  and  want  of  fineness 


i54  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

of  feeling  about  ever  so  many  others.  We  agree  with 
him  freely  enough,  subject  always  to  this  reserve 
already  glanced  at,  that  a  novelist  of  a  high  esthetic 
sensibility  must  always  find  more  in  any  other  novelist 
worth  considering  seriously  at  all  than  he  can  perhaps 
hope  to  impart  even  to  the  most  intelligent  of  critics 
pure  and  simple  his  subtle  reasons  for.  This  said, 
we  lose  ourselves,  to  admiration,  in  such  a  matter  for 
example  as  the  tight  hug  of  the  mere  material,  the 
supremely  important  if  such  ever  was,  represented  by 
the  appeal  to  us  on  behalf  of  the  money-matters  of 
Cesar  Birotteau. 

This  illustration  gains  logically,  much  more  than 
loses,  from  the  rank  predominance  of  the  money-ques- 
tion, the  money-vision,  throughout  all  Balzac.  There 
are  lights  in  which  it  can  scarce  not  appear  to  us  that 
his  own  interest  is  greater,  his  possibilities  of  attention 
truer,  in  these  pressing  particulars  than  in  all  other 
questions  put  together;  there  could  be  no  better  sign 
of  the  appreciation  of  "things,"  exactly,  than  so  never 
relaxed  a  grasp  of  the  part  played  in  the  world  by  just 
these.  Things  for  things,  the  franc,  the  shilling,  the 
dollar,  are  the  very  most  underlying  and  conditioning, 
even  dramatically,  even  poetically,  that  call  upon  him; 
and  we  have  everywhere  to  recognise  how  little  he 
feels  himself  to  be  telling  us  of  this,  that  and  the 
other  person  unless  he  has  first  given  us  full  informa- 
tion, with  every  detail,  either  as  to  their  private  means, 
their  income,  investments,  savings,  losses,  the  state 
in  fine  of  their  pockets,  or  as  to  their  immediate  place 
of  habitation,  their  home,  their  outermost  shell,  with 
its  windows  and  doors,  its  outside  appearance  and 
inside  plan,  its  rooms  and  furniture  and  arrangements, 


HONORS  DE   BALZAC  155 

its  altogether  intimate  facts,  down  to  its  very  smell. 
This  prompt  and  earnest  evocation  of  the  shell  and 
its  lining  is  but  another  way  of  testifying  with  due 
emphasis  to  economic  conditions.  The  most  personal 
shell  of  all,  the  significant  dress  of  the  individual, 
whether  man  or  woman,  is  subject  to  as  sharp  and  as 
deep  a  notation — it  being  no  small  part  of  his  wealth 
of  luck  that  the  age  of  dress  differentiated  and  spe- 
cialised from  class  to  class  and  character  to  character, 
not  least  moreover  among  men,  could  still  give  him 
opportunities  of  choice,  still  help  him  to  define  and 
intensify,  or  peculiarly  to  place  his  apparitions.  The 
old  world  in  which  costume  had,  to  the  last  refinement 
of  variety,  a  social  meaning  happily  lingered  on  for 
him;  and  nothing  is  more  interesting,  nothing  goes 
further  in  this  sense  of  the  way  the  social  concrete 
could  minister  to  him,  than  the  fact  that  "Cesar 
Birotteau,"  to  instance  that  masterpiece  again,  besides 
being  a  money-drama  of  the  closest  texture,  the  very 
epic  of  retail  bankruptcy,  is  at  the  same  time  the  all- 
vividest  exhibition  of  the  habited  and  figured,  the 
representatively  stamped  and  countenanced,  buttoned 
and  buckled  state  of  the  persons  moving  through  it. 
No  livelier  example  therefore  can  we  name  of  the 
triumphant  way  in  which  any  given,  or  as  we  should 
rather  say  taken,  total  of  conditions  works  out  under 
our  author's  hand  for  accentuation  of  type.  The 
story  of  poor  Birotteau  is  just  in  this  supreme  degree 
a  hard  total,  even  if  every  one's  money-relation  does 
loom  larger,  for  his  or  her  case,  than  anything  else. 

The  main  thing  doubtless  to  agree  with  M.  Faguet 
about,  however,  is  the  wonder  of  the  rate  at  which 
this  genius  for  an  infatuated  grasp  of  the  environment 


iS6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

could  multiply  the  creatures  swarming,  and  swarming 
at  their  best  to  perfection,  in  that  jungle  of  elements. 
A  jungle  certainly  the  environment,  the  rank  many- 
coloured  picture  of  France,  would  have  been  had  it  not 
really  created  in  our  observer  the  joy,  thanks  to  his 
need  of  a  clear  and  marked  order,  of  its  becoming  so 
arrangeable.  Nothing  could  interest  us  more  than  to 
note  with  our  critic  that  such  multiplications — taken 
after  all  at  such  a  rush — have  to  be  paid  for  by  a  sort 
of  limitation  of  quality  in  each,  the  quality  that,  be- 
yond a  certain  point  and  after  a  certain  allowance, 
ever  looks  askance  at  any  approach  to  what  it  may 
be  figured  as  taking  for  insolence  of  quantity.  Some 
inquiry  into  the  general  mystery  of  such  laws  of  pay- 
ment would  beckon  us  on  had  we  the  space — whereby 
we  might  glance  a  little  at  the  wondrous  why  and 
wherefore  of  the  sacrifice  foredoomed,  the  loss,  greater 
or  less,  of  those  ideals  now  compromised  by  the  tar- 
nished names  of  refinement  and  distinction,  yet  which 
we  are  none  the  less,  at  our  decentest,  still  ashamed 
too  entirely  to  turn  our  backs  on,  in  the  presence  of 
energies  that,  shaking  the  air  by  their  embrace  of  the 
common,  tend  to  dispossess  the  rare  of  a  certified  place 
in  it.  Delightful  to  the  critical  mind  to  estimate  the 
point  at  which,  in  the  picture  of  life,  a  sense  for  the 
element  of  the  rare  ceases  to  consort  with  a  sense, 
necessarily  large  and  lusty,  for  the  varieties  of  the  real 
that  super-abound.  Reducible  perhaps  to  some  ex- 
quisite measure  is  this  point  of  fatal  divergence.  It 
declared  itself,  the  divergence,  in  the  heart  of  Balzac's 
genius;  for  nothing  about  him  is  less  to  be  gainsaid 
than  that  on  the  other  or  further  side  of  a  certain  line 
of  rareness  drawn  his  authority,  so  splendid  on  the 
hither  or  familiar  side,  is  sadly  liable  to  lapse.  It 


HONORS  DE  BALZAC  157 

fails  to  take  in  whatever  fine  truth  experience  may 
have  vouchsafed  to  us  about  the  highest  kinds  of 
temper,  the  inward  life  of  the  mind,  the  cultivated 
consciousness.  His  truest  and  vividest  people  are 
those  whom  the  conditions  in  which  they  are  so  pal- 
pably embedded  have  simplified  not  less  than  empha- 
sised; simplified  mostly  to  singleness  of  motive  and 
passion  and  interest,  to  quite  measurably  finite  exis- 
tence; whereas  his  ostensibly  higher  spirits,  types 
necessarily  least  observed  and  most  independently 
thought  out,  in  the  interest  of  their  humanity,  as  we 
would  fain  ourselves  think  them,  are  his  falsest  and 
weakest  and  show  most  where  his  imagination  and 
his  efficient  sympathy  break  down. 

To  say  so  much  as  this  is  doubtless  to  provoke  the 
question  of  where  and  how  then,  under  so  many  other 
restrictions,  he  is  so  great — which  question  is  answered 
simply  by  our  claim  for  his  unsurpassed  mastery  of 
the  "middling"  sort,  so  much  the  most  numerous  in 
the  world,  the  middling  sort  pressed  upon  by  the  vast 
variety  of  their  dangers.  These  it  is  in  their  multi- 
tude whom  he  makes  individually  living,  each  with  a 
clustered  bunch  of  concomitants,  as  no  one,  to  our 
mind,  has  equalled  him  in  doing — above  all  with  the 
amount  of  repetition  of  the  feat  considered.  Finer 
images  than  the  middling,  but  so  much  fewer,  other 
creative  talents  have  thrown  off;  swarms  of  the  com- 
mon, on  the  other  hand,  have  obeyed  with  an  even 
greater  air  of  multitude  perhaps  than  in  Balzac's 
pages  the  big  brandished  enumerative  wand — only 
with  a  signal  forfeiture  in  this  case  of  that  gift  of  the 
sharply  separate,  the  really  rounded,  personality  which 
he  untiringly  conferred.  £mile  Zola,  by  so  far  the 


i  $8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

strongest  example  of  his  influence,  mustered  groups 
and  crowds  beyond  even  the  master's  own  compass; 
but  as  throughout  Zola  we  live  and  move  for  the  most 
part  but  in  crowds  (he  thinking  his  best  but  in  terms 
of  crowdedness),  so  in  Balzac,  where  he  rises  highest, 
we  deal,  whether  or  no  more  for  our  sense  of  ugliness 
than  of  beauty,  but  with  memorable  person  after  per- 
son. He  thought,  on  his  side — when  he  thought  at 
least  to  good  purpose — in  terms  the  most  expressively 
personal,  in  such  as  could  even  eventuate  in  monsters 
and  forms  of  evil  the  most  finished  we  know;  so  that 
if  he  too  has  left  us  a  multitude  of  which  we  may  say 
that  it  stands  alone  for  solidity,  it  nevertheless  exists 
by  addition  and  extension,  not  by  a  chemical  shaking- 
together,  a  cheapening  or  diminishing  fusion. 

It  is  not  that  the  series  of  the  Rougon-Macquart 
has  not  several  distinct  men  and  women  to  show — 
though  they  occur,  as  a  fact,  almost  in  "L'Assommoir" 
alone;  it  is  not  either  that  Zola  did  not  on  occasion 
try  for  the  cultivated  consciousness,  a  thing  of  course, 
so  far  as  ever  achieved  anywhere,  necessarily  separate 
and  distinguished;  it  is  that  he  tried,  on  such  ground, 
with  a  futility  only  a  shade  less  marked  than  Balzac's, 
and  perhaps  would  have  tried  with  equal  disaster  had 
he  happened  to  try  oftener.  If  we  find  in  his  pages  no 
such  spreading  waste  as  Balzac's  general  picture  of 
the  classes  "enjoying  every  advantage,"  that  is  of  the 
socially  highest — to  the  elder  writer's  success  in  de- 
picting particularly  the  female  members  of  which 
Sainte-Beuve,  and  Brunetiere  in  his  footsteps,  have 
rendered  such  strange  and  stupefying  homage — the 
reason  may  very  well  be  that  such  groups  could  not 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  figure  to  him  after  the  fashion 


HONORS   DE  BALZAC  159 

in  which  he  liked  groups  to  figure,  as  merely  herded 
and  compressed.  To  Balzac  they  were  groups  in 
which  individualisation  might  be  raised  to  its  very 
finest;  and  it  is  by  this  possibility  in  them  that  we 
watch  him  and  his  fertile  vulgarity,  his  peccant  taste, 
so  fallible  for  delicacies,  so  unerring  for  simplicities, 
above  all  doubtless  the  homeliest,  strongest  and  grim- 
mest, wofully  led  astray.  But  it  is  fairly  almost  a 
pleasure  to  our  admiration,  before  him,  to  see  what 
we  have  permitted  ourselves  to  call  the  "chunks"  of 
excision  carted  off  to  the  disengagement  of  the  values 
that  still  live.  The  wondrous  thing  is  that  they  live 
best  where  his  grand  vulgarity — since  we  are  not 
afraid  of  the  word — serves  him  rather  than  betrays; 
which  it  has  to  do,  we  make  out,  over  the  greater  part 
of  the  field  of  any  observer  for  whom  man  is  on  the 
whole  cruelly,  crushingly,  deformedly  conditioned.  We 
grant  that  as  to  Balzac's  view,  and  yet  feel  the  view  to 
have  been  at  the  same  time  incomparably  active  and 
productively  genial;  which  are  by  themselves  some- 
how qualities  and  reactions  that  redress  the  tragedy 
and  the  doom.  The  vulgarity  was  at  any  rate  a  force 
that  simply  got  nearer  than  any  other  could  have  done 
to  the  whole  detail,  the  whole  intimate  and  evidenced 
story,  of  submission  and  perversion,  and  as  such  it 
could  but  prove  itself  immensely  human.  It  is  on  all 
this  considered  ground  that  he  has  for  so  many  years 
stood  firm  and  that  we  feel  him  by  reason  of  it  and  in 
spite  of  them,  in  spite  of  all  that  has  come  and  gone, 
not  to  have  yielded,  have  "given,"  an  inch. 


GEORGE   SAND 
1897 

I  HAVE  been  reading  in  the  Revue  de  Paris  for  Novem- 
ber ist,  1896,  some  fifty  pages,  of  an  extraordinary 
interest,  which  have  had  in  respect  to  an  old  admira- 
tion a  remarkable  effect.  Undoubtedly  for  other  ad- 
mirers too  who  have  come  to  fifty  year — admirers,  I 
mean,  once  eager,  of  the  distinguished  woman  involved 
— the  perusal  of  the  letters  addressed  by  George  Sand 
to  Alfred  de  Musset  in  the  course  of  a  famous  friend- 
ship will  have  stirred  in  an  odd  fashion  the  ashes  of 
an  early  ardour.  I  speak  of  ashes  because  early 
ardours  for  the  most  part  burn  themselves  out,  while 
the  place  they  hold  in  our  lives  varies,  I  think,  mainly 
according  to  the  degree  of  tenderness  with  which  we 
gather  up  and  preserve  their  dust;  and  I  speak  of 
oddity  because  in  the  present  case  it  is  difficult  to  say 
whether  the  agitation  of  the  embers  results  at  last  in  a 
returning  glow  or  in  a  yet  more  sensible  chill.  That 
indeed  is  perhaps  a  small  question  compared  with  the 
simple  pleasure  of  the  reviving  emotion.  One  reads 
and  wonders  and  enjoys  again,  just  for  the  sake  of  the 
renewal.  The  small  fry  of  the  hour  submit  to  further 
shrinkage,  and  we  revert  with  a  sigh  of  relief  to  the 
free  genius  and  large  life  of  one  of  the  greatest  of  all 
masters  of  expression.  Do  people  still  handle  the 
works  of  this  master — people  other  than  young  ladies 
studying  French  with  "La  Mare  au  Diable"  and  a 

160 


GEORGE  SAND  161 

dictionary?  Are  there  persons  who  still  read  "Val- 
entine"? Are  there  others  capable  of  losing  them- 
selves in  "Mauprat"?  Has  "Andre,"  the  exquisite, 
dropped  out  of  knowledge,  and  is  any  one  left  who 
remembers  "Teverino"  ?  I  ask  these  questions  for  the 
mere  sweet  sound  of  them,  without  the  least  expecta- 
tion of  an  answer.  I  remember  asking  them  twenty 
years  ago,  after  Madame  Sand's  death,  and  not  then 
being  hopeful  of  the  answer  of  the  future.  But  the 
only  response  that  matters  to  us  perhaps  is  our  own, 
even  if  it  be  after  all  somewhat  ambiguous.  "Andre" 
and  "Valentine"  then  are  rather  on  our  shelves  than 
in  our  hands,  but  in  the  light  of  what  is  given  us  in 
the  "Revue  de  Paris"  who  shall  say  that  we  do  not, 
and  with  avidity,  "read"  George  Sand?  She  died  in 
1876,  but  she  lives  again  intensely  in  these  singular 
pages,  both  as  to  what  in  her  spirit  was  most  attaching 
and  what  most  disconcerting.  We  are  vague  as  to 
what  they  may  represent  for  the  generation  that  has 
come  to  the  front  since  her  death;  nothing,  I  dare  say, 
very  imposing  or  even  very  pleasing.  But  they  give 
out  a  great  deal  to  a  reader  for  whom  thirty  years 
ago — the  best  time  to  have  taken  her  as  a  whole — she 
was  a  high  clear  figure,  a  great  familiar  magician. 
This  impression  is  a  strange  mixture,  but  perhaps  not 
quite  incommunicable;  and  we  are  steeped  as  we 
receive  it  in  one  of  the  most  curious  episodes  in  the 
annals  of  the  literary  race. 

I 

It  is  the  great  interest  of  such  an  episode  that,  apart 
from  its  proportionate  place  in  the  unfolding  of  a 
personal  life  it  has  a  wonderful  deal  to  say  on  the  rela- 
tion between  experience  and  art  at  large.  It  con- 


162  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

stitutes  an  eminent  special  case,  in  which  the  workings 
of  that  relation  are  more  or  less  uncovered;  a  case  too 
of  which  one  of  the  most  striking  notes  is  that  we  are 
in  possession  of  it  almost  exclusively  by  the  act  of  one 
of  the  persons  concerned.  Madame  Sand  at  least, 
as  we  see  to-day,  was  eager  to  leave  nothing  undone 
that  could  make  us  further  acquainted  than  we  were 
before  with  one  of  the  liveliest  chapters  of  her  per- 
sonal history.  We  cannot,  doubtless,  be  sure  that 
her  conscious  purpose  in  the  production  of  "Elle  et 
Lui"  was  to  show  us  the  process  by  which  private 
ecstasies  and  pains  find  themselves  transmuted  in  the 
artist's  workshop  into  promising  literary  material — 
any  more  than  we  can  be  certain  of  her  motive  for 
making  toward  the  end  of  her  life  earnest  and  com- 
plete arrangements  for  the  ultimate  publication  of  the 
letters  in  which  the  passion  is  recorded  and  in  which 
we  can  remount  to  the  origin  of  the  volume.  If  "Elle 
et  Lui"  had  been  the  inevitable  picture,  postponed 
and  retouched,  of  the  great  adventure  of  her  youth,  so 
the  letters  show  us  the  crude  primary  stuff  from  which 
the  moral  detachment  of  the  book  was  distilled.  Were 
they  to  be  given  to  the  world  for  the  encouragement 
of  the  artist-nature — as  a  contribution  to  the  view 
that  no  suffering  is  great  enough,  no  emotion  tragic 
enough  to  exclude  the  hope  that  such  pangs  may  sooner 
or  later  be  esthetically  assimilated  ?  Was  the  whole 
proceeding,  in  intention,  a  frank  plea  for  the  intellectual 
and  in  some  degree  even  the  commercial  profit,  to  a 
robust  organism,  of  a  store  of  erotic  reminiscence  ? 
Whatever  the  reasons  behind  the  matter,  that  is  to  a 
certain  extent  the  moral  of  the  strange  story. 

It  may  be  objected  that  this  moral  is  qualified  to 
come  home  to  us  only  when  the  relation  between  art 


GEORGE  SAND  163 

and  experience  really  proves  a  happier  one  than  it 
may  be  held  to  have  proved  in  the  combination  before 
us.  The  element  in  danger  of  being  most  absent  from 
the  process  is  the  element  of  dignity,  and  its  presence, 
so  far  as  that  may  ever  at  all  be  hoped  for  in  an  appeal 
from  a  personal  quarrel,  is  assured  only  in  proportion 
as  the  esthetic  event,  standing  on  its  own  feet,  repre- 
sents a  noble  gift.  It  was  vain,  the  objector  may  say, 
for  our  author  to  pretend  to  justify  by  so  slight  a  per- 
formance as  "Elle  et  Lui"  that  sacrifice  of  all  delicacy 
which  has  culminated  in  this  supreme  surrender. 
"If  you  sacrifice  all  delicacy,"  I  hear  such  a  critic  con- 
tend, "show  at  least  that  you  were  right  by  giving  us 
a  masterpiece.  The  novel  in  question  is  no  more  a 
masterpiece,"  I  even  hear  him  proceed,  "than  any 
other  of  the  loose  liquid  lucid  works  of  its  author.  By 
your  supposition  of  a  great  intention  you  give  much 
too  fine  an  account  on  the  one  hand  of  a  personal  habit 
of  incontinence  and  on  the  other  of  a  literary  habit  of 
egotism.  Madame  Sand,  in  writing  her  tale  and  in 
publishing  her  love-letters,  obeyed  no  prompting  more 
exalted  than  that  of  exhibiting  her  personal  (in  which  I 
include  her  verbal)  facility,  and  of  doing  so  at  the  cost 
of  whatever  other  persons  might  be  concerned;  and 
you  are  therefore — and  you  might  as  well  immediately 
confess  it — thrown  back  for  the  element  of  interest  on 
the  attraction  of  her  general  eloquence,  the  plausibility 
of  her  general  manner  and  the  great  number  of  her 
particular  confidences.  You  are  thrown  back  on  your 
mere  curiosity  or  sympathy — thrown  back  from  any 
question  of  service  rendered  to  'art."  One  might  be 
thrown  back  doubtless  still  further  even  than  such  re- 
marks would  represent  if  one  were  not  quite  prepared 
with  the  confession  they  propose.  It  is  only  because 


164  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

such  a  figure  is  interesting — in  every  manifestation — 
that  its  course  is  marked  for  us  by  vivid  footprints 
and  possible  lessons.  And  to  enable  us  to  find  these 
it  scarcely  need  have  aimed  after  all  so  extravagantly 
high.  George  Sand  lived  her  remarkable  life  and  drove 
her  perpetual  pen,  but  the  illustration  that  I  began  by 
speaking  of  is  for  ourselves  to  gather — if  we  can. 

I  remember  hearing  many  years  ago  in  Paris  an 
anecdote  for  the  truth  of  which  I  am  far  from  vouching, 
though  it  professed  to  come  direct — an  anecdote  that 
has  recurred  to  me  more  than  once  in  turning  over  the 
revelations  of  the  Revue  de  Paris,  and  without  the 
need  of  the  special  reminder  (in  the  shape  of  an  allusion 
to  her  intimacy  with  the  hero  of  the  story)  contained 
in  those  letters  to  Sainte-Beuve  which  are  published 
in  the  number  of  November  I5th.  Prosper  Merimee 
was  said  to  have  related — in  a  reprehensible  spirit- 
that  during  a  term  of  association  with  the  author  of 
"Lelia"  he  once  opened  his  eyes,  in  the  raw  winter 
dawn,  to  see  his  companion,  in  a  dressing-gown,  on 
her  knees  before  the  domestic  hearth,  a  candlestick 
beside  her  and  a  red  madras  round  her  head,  making 
bravely,  with  her  own  hands,  the  fire  that  was  to 
enable  her  to  sit  down  betimes  to  urgent  pen  and 
paper.  The  story  represents  him  as  having  felt  that 
the  spectacle  chilled  his  ardour  and  tried  his  taste; 
her  appearance  was  unfortunate,  her  occupation  an 
inconsequence  and  her  industry  a  reproof — the  result 
of  all  of  which  was  a  lively  irritation  and  an  early 
rupture.  To  the  firm  admirer  of  Madame  Sand's 
prose  the  little  sketch  has  a  very  different  value,  for 
it  presents  her  in  an  attitude  which  is  the  very  key 
to  the  enigma,  the  answer  to  most  of  the  questions 


GEORGE  SAND  165 

with  which  her  character  confronts  us.  She  rose  early 
because  she  was  pressed  to  write,  and  she  was  pressed 
to  write  because  she  had  the  greatest  instinct  of  ex- 
pression ever  conferred  on  a  woman;  a  faculty  that 
put  a  premium  on  all  passion,  on  all  pain,  on  all  ex- 
perience and  all  exposure,  on  the  greatest  variety  of 
ties  and  the  smallest  reserve  about  them.  The  really 
interesting  thing  in  these  posthumous  laideurs  is  the 
way  the  gift,  the  voice,  carries  its  possessor  through 
them  and  lifts  her  on  the  whole  above  them.  It  gave 
her,  it  may  be  confessed  at  the  outset  and  in  spite  of 
all  magnanimities  in  the  use  of  it,  an  unfair  advantage 
in  every  connection.  So  at  least  we  must  continue  to 
feel  till — for  our  appreciation  of  this  particular  one 
—we  have  Alfred  de  Musset's  share  of  the  correspon- 
dence. For  we  shall  have  it  at  last,  in  whatever  faded 
fury  or  beauty  it  may  still  possess — to  that  we  may 
make  up  our  minds.  Let  the  galled  jade  wince,  it  is 
only  a  question  of  time.  The  greatest  of  literary  quar- 
rels will  in  short,  on  the  general  ground,  once  more 
come  up — the  quarrel  beside  which  all  others  are  mild 
and  arrangeable,  the  eternal  dispute  between  the 
public  and  the  private,  between  curiosity  and  delicacy. 

This  discussion  is  precisely  all  the  sharper  because 
it  takes  place  for  each  of  us  within  as  well  as  without. 
When  we  wish  to  know  at  all  we  wish  to  know  every- 
thing; yet  there  happen  to  be  certain  things  of  which 
no  better  description  can  be  given  than  that  they  are 
simply  none  of  our  business.  "What  is  then  forsooth 
of  our  business  ?"  the  genuine  analyst  may  always  ask; 
and  he  may  easily  challenge  us  to  produce  any  rule  of 
general  application  by  which  we  shall  know  when  to 
push  in  and  when  to  back  out.  "In  the  first  place," 


166  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

he  may  continue,  "half  the  'interesting'  people  in  the 
world  have  at  one  time  or  another  set  themselves  to 
drag  us  in  with  all  their  might;  and  what  in  the  world 
in  such  a  relation  is  the  observer  that  he  should  ab- 
surdly pretend  to  be  in  more  of  a  flutter  than  the  object 
observed  ?  The  mannikin,  in  all  schools,  is  at  an  early 
stage  of  study  of  the  human  form  inexorably  superseded 
by  the  man.  Say  that  we  are  to  give  up  the  attempt 
to  understand:  it  might  certainly  be  better  so,  and 
there  would  be  a  delightful  side  to  the  new  arrange- 
ment. But  in  the  name  of  common-sense  don't  say 
that  the  continuity  of  life  is  not  to  have  some  equiva- 
lent in  the  continuity  of  pursuit,  the  renewal  of  phe- 
nomena in  the  renewal  of  notation.  There  is  not  a 
door  you  can  lock  here  against  the  critic  or  the  painter, 
not  a  cry  you  can  raise  or  a  long  face  you  can  pull  at 
him,  that  are  not  quite  arbitrary  things.  The  only 
thing  that  makes  the  observer  competent  is  that  he  is 
neither  afraid  nor  ashamed;  the  only  thing  that  makes 
him  decent — just  think ! — is  that  he  is  not  superficial." 
All  this  is  very  well,  but  somehow  we  all  equally  feel 
that  there  is  clean  linen  and  soiled  and  that  life  would 
be  intolerable  without  some  acknowledgment  even  by 
the  pushing  of  such  a  thing  as  forbidden  ground.  M. 
Emile  Zola,  at  the  moment  I  write,  gives  to  the  world 
his  reasons  for  rejoicing  in  the  publication  of  the 
physiological  enquete  of  Dr.  Toulouse — a  marvellous 
catalogue  or  handbook  of  M.  Zola's  outward  and  in- 
ward parts,  which  leaves  him  not  an  inch  of  privacy, 
so  to  speak,  to  stand  on,  leaves  him  nothing  about 
himself  that  is  for  himself,  for  his  friends,  his  relatives, 
his  intimates,  his  lovers,  for  discovery,  for  emulation, 
for  fond  conjecture  or  flattering  deluded  envy.  It  is 
enough  for  M.  Zola  that  everything  is  for  the  public 


GEORGE  SAND  167 

and  no  sacrifice  worth  thinking  of  when  it  is  a  question 
of  presenting  to  the  open  mouth  of  that  apparently 
gorged  but  still  gaping  monster  the  smallest  spoonful 
of  truth.  The  truth,  to  his  view,  is  never  either  ridic- 
ulous or  unclean,  and  the  way  to  a  better  life  lies 
through  telling  it,  so  far  as  possible,  about  everything 
and  about  every  one. 

There  would  probably  be  no  difficulty  in  agreeing 
to  this  if  it  didn't  seem  on  the  part  of  the  speaker  the 
result  of  a  rare  confusion  between  give  and  take,  be-  . 
tween  "truth"  and  information.  The  true  thing  that 
most  matters  to  us  is  the  true  thing  we  have  most  use 
for,  and  there  are  surely  many  occasions  on  which  the 
truest  thing  of  all  is  the  necessity  of  the  mind,  its  sim- 
ple necessity  of  feeling.  Whether  it  feels  in  order  to 
learn  or  learns  in  order  to  feel,  the  event  is  the  same: 
the  side  on  which  it  shall  most  feel  will  be  the  side  to 
which  it  will  most  incline.  If  it  feels  more  about  a 
Zola  functionally  undeciphered  it  will  be  governed 
more  by  that  particular  truth  than  by  the  truth  about 
his  digestive  idiosyncrasies,  or  even  about  his  "olfactive 
perceptions"  and  his  "arithmomania  or  impulse  to 
count."  An  affirmation  of  our  "mere  taste"  may  very 
supposedly  be  our  individual  contribution  to  the  gen- 
eral clearing  up.  Nothing  often  is  less  superficial  than 
to  ignore  and  overlook,  or  more  constructive  (for  liv- 
ing and  feeling  at  all)  than  to  want  impatiently  to 
choose.  If  we  are  aware  that  in  the  same  way  as 
about  a  Zola  undeciphered  we  should  have  felt  more 
about  a  George  Sand  unexposed,  the  true  thing  we 
have  gained  becomes  a  poor  substitute  for  the  one  we 
have  lost;  and  I  scarce  see  what  difference  it  makes 
that  the  view  of  the  elder  novelist  appears  in  this  mat- 


168  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ter  quite  to  march  with  that  of  the  younger.  I  hasten 
to  add  that  as  to  being  of  course  asked  why  in  the 
world  with  such  a  leaning  we  have  given  time  either 
to  M.  Zola's  physician  or  to  Musset's  correspondent, 
this  is  only  another  illustration  of  the  bewildering 
state  of  the  subject.  * 

When  we  meet  on  the  broad  highway  the  rueful 
denuded  figure  we  need  some  presence  of  mind  to 
decide  whether  to  cut  it  dead  or  to  lead  it  gently  home, 
and  meanwhile  the  fatal  complication  easily  occurs. 
We  have  seen,  in  a  flash  of  our  own  wit,  and  mystery 
has  fled  with  a  shriek.  These  encounters  are  indeed 
accidents  which  may  at  any  time  take  place,  and  the 
general  guarantee  in  a  noisy  world  lies,  I  judge,  not  so 
much  in  any  hope  of  really  averting  them  as  in  a  reg- 
ular organisation  of  the  struggle.  The  reporter  and 
the  reported  have  duly  and  equally  to  understand  that 
they  carry  their  life  in  their  hands.  There  are  secrets 
for  privacy  and  silence;  let  them  only  be  cultivated 
on  the  part  of  the  hunted  creature  with  even  half  the 
method  with  which  the  love  of  sport — or  call  it  the 
historic  sense — is  cultivated  on  the  part  of  the  inves- 
tigator. They  have  been  left  too  much  to  the  natural, 
the  instinctive  man;  but  they  will  be  twice  as  effective 
after  it  begins  to  be  observed  that  they  may  take  their 
place  among  the  triumphs  of  civilisation.  Then  at 
last  the  game  will  be  fair  and  the  two  forces  face  to 
face;  it  will  be  "pull  devil,  pull  tailor,"  and  the  hard- 
est pull  will  doubtless  provide  the  happiest  result. 
Then  the  cunning  of  the  inquirer,  envenomed  with 
resistance,  will  exceed  in  subtlety  and  ferocity  anything 
we  to-day  conceive,  and  the  pale  forewarned  victim, 
with  every  track  covered,  every  paper  burnt  and 


GEORGE  SAND  169 

every  letter  unanswered,  will,  in  the  tower  of  art,  the 
invulnerable  granite,  stand,  without  a  sally,  the  siege 
of  all  the  years. 

II 

It  was  not  in  the  tower  of  art  that  George  Sand  ever 
shut  herself  up;  but  I  come  back  to  a  point  already 
made  in  saying  that  it  is  in  the  citadel  of  style  that, 
notwithstanding  rash  sorties,  she  continues  to  hold  out. 
The  outline  of  the  complicated  story  that  was  to  cause 
so  much  ink  to  flow  gives,  even  with  the  omission  of  a 
hundred  features,  a  direct  measure  of  the  strain  to 
which  her  astonishing  faculty  was  exposed.  In  the 
summer  of  1833,  as  a  woman  of  nearly  thirty,  she  en- 
countered Alfred  de  Musset,  who  was  six  years  her 
junior.  In  spite  of  their  youth  they  were  already 
somewhat  bowed  by  the  weight  of  a  troubled  past. 
Musset,  at  twenty-three,  had  that  of  his  confirmed 
libertinism — so  Madame  Arvede  Barine,  who  has  had 
access  to  materials,  tells  us  in  the  admirable  short 
biography  of  the  poet  contributed  to  the  rather  mark- 
edly unequal  but  very  interesting  series  of  Hachette's 
Grands  Ecrivains  Fran9ais.  Madame  Sand  had  a 
husband,  a  son  and  a  daughter,  and  the  impress  of 
that  succession  of  lovers — Jules  Sandeau  had  been 
one,  Prosper  Merimee  another — to  which  she  so  freely 
alludes  in  the  letters  to  Sainte-Beuve,  a  friend  more 
disinterested  than  these  and  qualified  to  give  much 
counsel  in  exchange  for  much  confidence.  It  cannot 
be  said  that  the  situation  of  either  of  our  young  per- 
sons was  of  good  omen  for  a  happy  relation,  but  they 
appear  to  have  burnt  their  ships  with  much  prompti- 
tude and  a  great  blaze,  and  in  the  December  of  that 


170  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

year  they  started  together  for  Italy.  The  following 
month  saw  them  settled,  on  a  frail  basis,  in  Venice, 
where  the  elder  companion  remained  till  late  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1834  and  where  she  wrote,  in  part,  "Jacques" 
and  the  "Lettres  d'un  Voyageur,"  as  well  as  "An- 
dre" and  "Leone-Leoni,"  and  gathered  the  impres- 
sions to  be  embodied  later  in  half-a-dozen  stones 
with  Italian  titles — notably  in  the  delightful  "Con- 
suelo."  The  journey,  the  Italian  climate,  the  Venetian 
winter  at  first  agreed  with  neither  of  the  friends; 
they  were  both  taken  ill — the  young  man  very  gravely 
— and  after  a  stay  of  three  months  Musset  returned, 
alone  and  much  ravaged,  to  Paris. 

In  the  meantime  a  great  deal  had  happened,  for 
their  union  had  been  stormy  and  their  security  small. 
Madame  Sand  had  nursed  her  companion  in  illness 
(a  matter-of-course  office,  it  must  be  owned)  and  her 
companion  had  railed  at  his  nurse  in  health.  A 
young  physician,  called  in,  had  become  a  close  friend 
of  both  parties,  but  more  particularly  a  close  friend 
of  the  lady,  and  it  was  to  his  tender  care  that  on  quit- 
ting the  scene  Musset  solemnly  committed  her.  She 
took  up  life  with  Pietro  Pagello — the  transition  is 
startling — for  the  rest  of  her  stay,  and  on  her  journey 
back  to  France  he  was  no  inconsiderable  part  of  her 
luggage.  He  was  simple,  robust  and  kind — not  a  man 
of  genius.  He  remained,  however,  but  a  short  time 
in  Paris;  in  the  autumn  of  1834  he  returned  to  Italy, 
to  live  on  till  our  own  day  but  never  again,  so  far  as  we 
know,  to  meet  his  illustrious  mistress.  Her  inter- 
course with  her  poet  was,  in  all  its  intensity,  one  may 
almost  say  its  ferocity,  promptly  renewed,  and  was 
sustained  in  that  key  for  several  months  more.  The 


GEORGE  SAND  171 

effect  of  this  strange  and  tormented  passion  on  the 
mere  student  of  its  records  is  simply  to  make  him  ask 
himself  what  on  earth  is  the  matter  with  the  subjects 
of  it.  Nothing  is  more  easy  than  to  say,  as  I  have 
intimated,  that  it  has  no  need  of  records  and  no  need 
of  students;  but  this  leaves  out  of  account  the  thick 
medium  of  genius  in  which  it  was  foredoomed  to  dis- 
port itself.  It  was  self-registering,  as  the  phrase  is, 
for  the  genius  on  both  sides  happened  to  be  the  genius 
of  eloquence.  It  is  all  rapture  and  all  rage  and  all 
literature.  The  "Lettres  d'un  Voyageur"  spring  from 
the  thick  of  the  fight;  "La  Confession  d'un  Enfant  du 
Siecle"  and  "Les  Nuits"  are  immediate  echoes  of  the 
concert.  The  lovers  are  naked  in  the  market-place 
and  perform  for  the  benefit  of  society.  The  matter 
with  them,  to  the  perception  of  the  stupefied  spectator, 
is  that  they  entertained  for  each  other  every  feeling 
in  life  but  the  feeling  of  respect.  What  the  absence 
of  that  article  may  do  for  the  passion  of  hate  is  appar- 
ently nothing  to  what  it  may  do  for  the  passion  of 
love. 

By  our  unhappy  pair  at  any  rate  the  luxury  in 
question — the  little  luxury  of  plainer  folk — was  not  to 
be  purchased,  and  in  the  comedy  of  their  despair  and 
the  tragedy  of  their  recovery  nothing  is  more  striking 
than  their  convulsive  effort  either  to  reach  up  to  it  or 
to  do  without  it.  They  would  have  given  for  it  all 
else  they  possessed,  but  they  only  meet  in  their  strug- 
gle the  inexorable  never.  They  strain  and  pant  and 
gasp,  they  beat  the  air  in  vain  for  the  cup  of  cold 
water  of  their  hell.  They  missed  it  in  a  way  for  which 
none  of  their  superiorities  could  make  up.  Their 
great  affliction  was  that  each  found  in  the  life  of  the 


172  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

other  an  armoury  of  weapons  to  wound.  Young  as 
they  were,  young  as  Musset  was  in  particular,  they 
appeared  to  have  afforded  each  other  in  that  direction 
the  most  extraordinary  facilities;  and  nothing  in  the 
matter  of  the  mutual  consideration  that  failed  them  is 
more  sad  and  strange  than  that  even  in  later  years, 
when  their  rage,  very  quickly,  had  cooled,  they  never 
arrived  at  simple  silence.  For  Madame  Sand,  in  her 
so  much  longer  life,  there  was  no  hush,  no  letting 
alone;  though  it  would  be  difficult  indeed  to  exag- 
gerate the  depth  of  relative  indifference  from  which, 
a  few  years  after  Musset's  death,  such  a  production 
as  "Elle  et  Lui"  could  spring.  Of  course  there  had 
been  floods  of  tenderness,  of  forgiveness;  but  those, 
for  all  their  beauty  of  expression,  are  quite  another 
matter.  It  is  just  the  fact  of  our  sense  of  the  ugliness 
of  so  much  of  the  episode  that  makes  a  wonder  and  a 
force  of  the  fine  style,  all  round,  in  which  it  is  offered 
us.  That  force  is  in  its  turn  a  sort  of  clue  to  guide, 
or  perhaps  rather  a  sign  to  stay,  our  feet  in  paths  after 
all  not  the  most  edifying.  It  gives  a  degree  of  impor- 
tance to  the  somewhat  squalid  and  the  somewhat 
ridiculous  story,  and,  for  the  old  George-Sandist  at 
least,  lends  a  positive  spell  to  the  smeared  and  yel- 
lowed paper,  the  blotted  and  faded  ink.  In  this  twi- 
light of  association  we  seem  to  find  a  reply  to  our  own 
challenge  and  to  be  able  to  tell  ourselves  why  we  med- 
dle with  such  old  dead  squabbles  and  waste  our  time 
with  such  grimacing  ghosts.  If  we  were  superior  to 
the  weakness,  moreover,  how  should  we  make  our 
point  (which  we  must  really  make  at  any  cost)  as  to 
the  so  valuable  vivid  proof  that  a  great  talent  is  the 
best  guarantee — that  it  may  really  carry  off  almost 
anything  ? 


GEORGE  SAND  173 

The  rather  sorry  ghost  that  beckons  us  on  furthest 
is  the  rare  personality  of  Madame  Sand.  Under  its 
influence — or  that  of  old  memories  from  which  it  is 
indistinguishable — we  pick  our  steps  among  the  laideurs 
aforesaid:  the  misery,  the  levity,  the  brevity  of  it  all, 
the  greatest  ugliness  in  particular  that  this  life  shows  us, 
the  way  the  devotions  and  passions  that  we  see  heaven 
and  earth  called  to  witness  are  over  before  we  can  turn 
round.  It  may  be  said  that,  for  what  it  was,  the  inter- 
course of  these  unfortunates  surely  lasted  long  enough; 
but  the  answer  to  that  is  that  if  it  had  only  lasted 
longer  it  wouldn't  have  been  what  it  was.  It  was  not 
only  preceded  and  followed  by  intimacies,  on  one  side 
and  the  other,  as  unadorned  by  the  stouter  sincerity, 
but  was  mixed  up  with  them  in  a  manner  that  would 
seem  to  us  dreadful  if  it  didn't  still  more  seem  to  us 
droll,  or  rather  perhaps  if  it  didn't  refuse  altogether 
to  come  home  to  us  with  the  crudity  of  contemporary 
things.  It  is  antediluvian  history,  a  queer  vanished 
world — another  Venice  from  the  actually,  the  de- 
plorably familiarised,  a  Paris  of  greater  bonhomie,  an 
inconceivable  impossible  Nohant.  This  relegates  it 
to  an  order  agreeable  somehow  to  the  imagination  of 
the  fond  quinquegenarian,  the  reader  with  a  fund  of 
reminiscence.  The  vanished  world,  the  Venice  unre- 
stored,  the  Paris  unextended,  is  a  bribe  to  his  judg- 
ment; he  has  even  a  glance  of  complacency  for  the 
lady's  liberal  foyer.  Liszt,  one  lovely  year  at  Nohant, 
"jouait  du  piano  au  rez-de-chaussee,  et  les  rossignols, 
ivres  de  musique  et  de  soleil,  s'egosillaient  avec  rage 
sur  les  lilas  environnants."  The  beautiful  manner 
confounds  itself  with  the  conditions  in  which  it  was 
exercised,  the  large  liberty  and  variety  overflow  into 
admirable  prose,  and  the  whole  thing  makes  a  charm- 


174  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ing  faded  medium  in  which  Chopin  gives  a  hand  to 
Consuelo  and  the  small  Fadette  has  her  elbows  on  the 
table  of  Flaubert. 

There  is  a  terrible  letter  of  the  autumn  of  1834  in 
which  our  heroine  has  recourse  to  Alfred  Tattet  on  a 
dispute  with  the  bewildered  Pagello — a  disagreeable 
matter  that  involved  a  question  of  money.  "A  Venise 
il  comprenait,"  she  somewhere  says,  "a  Paris  il  ne 
comprend  plus."  It  was  a  proof  of  remarkable  in- 
telligence that  he  did  understand  in  Venice,  where 
he  had  become  a  lover  in  the  presence  and  with  the 
exalted  approval  of  an  immediate  predecessor — an 
alternate  representative  of  the  part,  whose  turn  had 
now,  on  the  removal  to  Paris,  come  round  again  and  in 
whose  resumption  of  office  it  was  looked  to  him  to 
concur.  This  attachment — to  Pagello — had  lasted  but 
a  few  months;  yet  already  it  was  the  prey  of  complica- 
tion and  change,  and  its  sun  appears  to  have  set  in  no 
very  graceful  fashion.  We  are  not  here  in  truth 
among  very  graceful  things,  in  spite  of  superhuman 
attitudes  and  great  romantic  flights.  As  to  these 
forced  notes  Madame  Arvede  Barine  judiciously  says 
that  the  picture  of  them  contained  in  the  letters  to 
which  she  had  had  access,  and  some  of  which  are  be- 
fore us,  "presents  an  example  extraordinary  and  un- 
matched of  what  the  romantic  spirit  could  do  with 
beings  who  had  become  its  prey."  She  adds  that  she 
regards  the  records  in  question,  "in  which  we  follow 
step  by  step  the  ravages  of  the  monster,"  as  "one  of 
the  most  precious  psychological  documents  of  the  first 
half  of  the  century."  That  puts  the  story  on  its  true 
footing,  though  we  may  regret  that  it  should  not 
divide  these  documentary  honours  more  equally  with 


GEORGE  SAND  175 

some  other  story  in  which  the  monster  has  not  quite 
so  much  the  best  of  it.  But  it  is  the  misfortune  of  the 
comparatively  short  and  simple  annals  of  conduct  and 
character  that  they  should  ever  seem  to  us  somehow 
to  cut  less  deep.  Scarce — to  quote  again  his  best 
biographer  —  had  Musset,  at  Venice,  begun  to  re- 
cover from  his  illness  than  the  two  lovers  were  seized 
afresh  by  le  vertige  du  sublime  et  de  I 'impossible.  "Us 
imaginerent  les  deviations  de  sentiment  les  plus  bi- 
zarres,  et  leur  interieur  fut  le  theatre  de  scenes  qui 
egalaient  en  etrangete  les  fantaisies  les  plus  audacieuses 
de  la  litterature  contemporaine;"  that  is  of  the  litera- 
ture of  their  own  day.  The  register  of  virtue  con- 
tains no  such  lively  items — save  indeed  in  so  far  as 
these  contortions  and  convulsions  were  a  conscious 
tribute  to  virtue. 

Ten  weeks  after  Musset  has  left  her  in  Venice  his 
relinquished  but  not  dissevered  mistress  writes  to  him 
in  Paris:  "God  keep  you,  my  friend,  in  your  present 
disposition  of  heart  and  mind.  Love  is  a  temple  built 
by  the  lover  to  an  object  more  or  less  worthy  of  his 
worship,  and  what  is  grand  in  the  thing  is  not  so  much 
the  god  as  the  altar.  Why  should  you  be  afraid  of 
the  risk?" — of  a  new  mistress  she  means.  There 
would  seem  to  be  reasons  enough  why  he  should  have 
been  afraid,  but  nothing  is  more  characteristic  than  her 
eagerness  to  push  him  into  the  arms  of  another  woman 
—more  characteristic  either  of  her  whole  philosophy 
in  these  matters  or  of  their  tremendous,  though  some- 
what conflicting,  effort  to  be  good.  She  is  to  be  good 
by  showing  herself  so  superior  to  jealousy  as  to  stir  up 
in  him  a  new  appetite  for  a  new  object,  and  he  is  to 
be  so  by  satisfying  it  to  the  full.  It  appears  not  to 


176  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

occur  to  either  one  that  in  such  an  arrangement  his 
own  honesty  is  rather  sacrificed.  Or  is  it  indeed  be- 
cause he  has  scruples — or  even  a  sense  of  humour — 
that  she  insists  with  such  ingenuity  and  such  eloquence  ? 
"Let  the  idol  stand  long  or  let  it  soon  break,  you  will 
in  either  case  have  built  a  beautiful  shrine.  Your  soul 
will  have  lived  in  it,  have  filled  it  with  divine  incense, 
and  a  soul  like  yours  must  produce  great  works.  The 
god  will  change  perhaps,  the  temple  will  last  as  long 
as  yourself."  "Perhaps,"  under  the  circumstances, 
was  charming.  The  letter  goes  on  with  the  ample 
flow  that  was  always  at  the  author's  command — an 
ease  of  suggestion  and  generosity,  of  beautiful  melan- 
choly acceptance,  in  which  we  foresee,  on  her  own 
horizon,  the  dawn  of  new  suns.  Her  simplifications 
are  delightful  —  they  remained  so  to  the  end;  her 
touch  is  a  wondrous  sleight-of-hand.  The  whole  of 
this  letter  in  short  is  a  splendid  utterance  and  a  mas- 
terpiece of  the  shade  of  sympathy,  not  perhaps  the 
clearest,  which  consists  of  wishing  another  to  feel  as 
you  feel  yourself.  To  feel  as  George  Sand  felt,  how- 
ever, one  had  to  be,  like  George  Sand,  of  the  true  male 
inwardness;  which  poor  Musset  was  far  from  being. 
This,  we  surmise,  was  the  case  with  most  of  her  lovers, 
and  the  truth  that  makes  the  idea  of  her  liaison  with 
Merimee,  who  was  of  a  consistent  virility,  sound  almost 
like  a  union  against  nature.  She  repeats  to  her  corre- 
spondent, on  grounds  admirably  stated,  the  injunc- 
tion that  he  is  to  give  himself  up,  to  let  himself  go,  to 
take  his  chance.  That  he  took  it  we  all  know — he  fol- 
lowed her  advice  only  too  well.  It  is  indeed  not  long 
before  his  manner  of  doing  so  draws  from  her  a  cry  of 
distress.  "Ta  conduite  est  deplorable,  impossible. 
Mon  Dieu,  a  quelle  vie  vais-je  te  laisser  ?  Tivresse,  le 


GEORGE  SAND  177 

vin,  les  filles,  et  encore  et  toujours!"  But  appre- 
hensions were  now  too  late;  they  would  have  been  too 
late  at  the  very  earliest  stage  of  this  celebrated  con- 
nection. 


Ill 

The  great  difficulty  was  that,  though  they  were  sub- 
lime, the  couple  were  really  not  serious.  But  on  the 
other  hand  if  on  a  lady's  part  in  such  a  relation  the 
want  of  sincerity  or  of  constancy  is  a  grave  reproach 
the  matter  is  a  good  deal  modified  when  the  lady,  as  I 
have  mentioned,  happens  to  be — I  may  not  go  so  far 
as  to  say  a  gentleman.  That  George  Sand  just  fell 
short  of  this  character  was  the  greatest  difficulty  of 
all;  because  if  a  woman,  in  a  love  affair,  may  be — for 
all  she  is  to  gain  or  to  lose — what  she  likes,  there  is 
only  one  thing  that,  to  carry  it  off  with  any  degree  of 
credit,  a  man  may  be.  Madame  Sand  forgot  this  on 
the  day  she  published  "Elle  et  Lui";  she  forgot  it 
again  more  gravely  when  she  bequeathed  to  the  great 
snickering  public  these  present  shreds  and  relics  of 
unutterably  personal  things.  The  aberration  refers 
itself  to  the  strange  lapses  of  still  other  occasions— 
notably  to  the  extraordinary  absence  of  scruples  with 
which  she  in  the  delightful  "Histoire  de  ma  Vie" 
gives  away,  as  we  say,  the  character  of  her  remarkable 
mother.  The  picture  is  admirable  for  vividness,  for 
breadth  of  touch;  it  would  be  perfect  from  any  hand 
not  a  daughter's,  and  we  ask  ourselves  wonderingly 
how  through  all  the  years,  to  make  her  capable  of  it,  a 
long  perversion  must  have  worked  and  the  filial  fibre 
— or  rather  the  general  flower  of  sensibility — have  been 
battered.  Not  this  particular  anomaly,  however,  but 


178  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

many  another,  yields  to  the  reflection  that  as  just  after 
her  death  a  very  perceptive  person  who  had  known 
her  well  put  it  to  the  author  of  these  remarks,  she  was 
a  woman  quite  by  accident.  Her  immense  plausibility 
was  almost  the  only  sign  of  her  sex.  She  needed 
always  to  prove  that  she  had  been  in  the  right;  as  how 
indeed  could  a  person  fail  to  who,  thanks  to  the  spe- 
cial equipment  I  have  named,  might  prove  it  so  bril- 
liantly ?  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  of  her  gift  of  ex- 
pression— and  I  have  already  in  effect  said  so — that 
from  beginning  to  end  it  floated  her  over  the  real  as  a 
high  tide  floats  a  ship  over  the  bar.  She  was  never 
left  awkwardly  straddling  on  the  sandbank  of  fact. 

For  the  rest,  in  any  case,  with  her  free  experience 
and  her  free  use  of  it,  her  literary  style,  her  love  of 
ideas  and  questions,  of  science  and  philosophy,  her 
comradeship,  her  boundless  tolerance,  her  intellectual 
patience,  her  personal  good-humour  and  perpetual 
tobacco  (she  smoked  long  before  women  at  large  felt 
the  cruel  obligation),  with  all  these  things  and  many 
I  don't  mention  she  had  more  of  the  inward  and  out- 
ward of  the  other  sex  than  of  her  own.  She  had 
above  all  the  mark  that,  to  speak  at  this  time  of  day 
with  a  freedom  for  which  her  action  in  the  matter  of 
publicity  gives  us  warrant,  the  history  of  her  personal 
passions  reads  singularly  like  a  chronicle  of  the  ravages 
of  some  male  celebrity.  Her  relations  with  men  closely 
resembled  those  relations  with  women  that,  from  the 
age  of  Pericles  or  that  of  Petrarch,  have  been  com- 
placently commemorated  as  stages  in  the  unfolding 
of  the  great  statesman  and  the  great  poet.  It  is  very 
much  the  same  large  list,  the  same  story  of  free  ap- 
propriation and  consumption.  She  appeared  in  short 


GEORGE  SAND  179 

to  have  lived  through  a  succession  of  such  ties  ex- 
actly in  the  manner  of  a  Goethe,  a  Byron  or  a  Na- 
poleon; and  if  millions  of  women,  of  course,  of  every 
condition,  had  had  more  lovers,  it  was  probable  that 
no  woman  independently  so  occupied  and  so  diligent 
had  had,  as  might  be  said,  more  unions.  Her  fashion 
was  quite  her  own  of  extracting  from  this  sort  of  ex- 
perience all  that  it  had  to  give  her  and  being  withal 
only  the  more  just  and  bright  and  true,  the  more  sane 
and  superior,  improved  and  improving.  She  strikes 
us  as  in  the  benignity  of  such  an  intercourse  even  more 
than  maternal:  not  so  much  the  mere  fond  mother 
as  the  supersensuous  grandmother  of  the  wonderful 
affair.  Is  not  that  practically  the  character  in  which 
Therese  Jacques  studies  to  present  herself  to  Laurent 
de  Fauvel  ?  the  light  in  which  "Lucrezia  Floriani"  (a 
memento  of  a  friendship  for  Chopin,  for  Liszt)  shows 
the  heroine  as  affected  toward  Prince  Karol  and  his 
friend  ?  George  Sand  is  too  inveterately  moral,  too 
preoccupied  with  that  need  to  do  good  which  is  in  art 
often  the  enemy  of  doing  well;  but  in  all  her  work 
the  story-part,  as  children  call  it,  has  the  freshness  and 
good  faith  of  a  monastic  legend.  It  is  just  possible 
indeed  that  the  moral  idea  was  the  real  mainspring  of 
her  course — I  mean  a  sense  of  the  duty  of  avenging  on 
the  unscrupulous  race  of  men  their  immemorial  selfish 
success  with  the  plastic  race  of  women.  Did  she  wish 
above  all  to  turn  the  tables — to  show  how  the  sex 
that  had  always  ground  the  other  in  the  volitional  mill 
was  on  occasion  capable  of  being  ground  ? 

However  this  may  be,  nothing  is  more  striking  than 
the  inward  impunity  with  which  she  gave  herself  to 
conditions  that  are  usually  held  to  denote  or  to  involve 


i8o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

a  state  of  demoralisation.  This  impunity  (to  speak 
only  of  consequences  or  features  that  concern  us)  was 
not,  I  admit,  complete,  but  it  was  sufficiently  so  to 
warrant  us  in  saying  that  no  one  was  ever  less  demor- 
alised. She  presents  a  case  prodigiously  discouraging 
to  the  usual  view — the  view  that  there  is  no  surrender 
to  "unconsecrated"  passion  that  we  escape  paying 
for  in  one  way  or  another.  It  is  frankly  difficult  to 
see  where  this  eminent  woman  conspicuously  paid. 
She  positively  got  off  from  paying — and  in  a  cloud 
of  fluency  and  dignity,  benevolence,  competence,  in- 
telligence. She  sacrificed,  it  is  true,  a  handful  of 
minor  coin — suffered  by  failing  wholly  to  grasp  in  her 
picture  of  life  certain  shades  and  certain  delicacies. 
What  she  paid  was  this  irrecoverable  loss  of  her  touch 
for  them.  That  is  undoubtedly  one  of  the  reasons 
why  to-day  the  picture  in  question  has  perceptibly 
faded,  why  there  are  persons  who  would  perhaps  even 
go  so  far  as  to  say  that  it  has  really  a  comic  side.  She 
doesn't  know,  according  to  such  persons,  her  right  hand 
from  her  left,  the  crooked  from  the  straight  and  the 
clean  from  the  unclean:  it  was  a  sense  she  lacked  or  a 
tact  she  had  rubbed  off,  and  her  great  work  is  by  the 
fatal  twist  quite  as  lopsided  a  monument  as  the  leaning 
tower  of  Pisa.  Some  readers  may  charge  her  with  a 
graver  confusion  still — the  incapacity  to  distinguish 
between  fiction  and  fact,  the  truth  straight  from  the 
well  and  the  truth  curling  in  steam  from  the  kettle  and 
preparing  the  comfortable  tea.  There  is  no  word 
oftener  on  her  pen,  they  will  remind  us,  than  the  verb 
to  "arrange."  She  arranged  constantly,  she  arranged 
beautifully;  but  from  this  point  of  view,  that  of  a 
general  suspicion  of  arrangements,  she  always  proved 
too  much.  Turned  over  in  the  light  of  it  the  story  of 


GEORGE  SAND  181 

"Elle  et  Lui"  for  instance  is  an  attempt  to  prove  that 
the  mistress  of  Laurent  de  Fauvel  was  little  less  than 
a  prodigy  of  virtue.  What  is  there  not,  the  intem- 
perate admirer  may  be  challenged  to  tell  us,  an  attempt 
to  prove  in  "L'Histoire  de  ma  Vie"? — a  work  from 
which  we  gather  every  delightful  impression  but  the 
impression  of  an  impeccable  veracity. 

These  reservations  may,  however,  all  be  sufficiently 
just  without  affecting  our  author's  peculiar  air  of  hav- 
ing eaten  her  cake  and  had  it,  been  equally  initiated 
in  directions  the  most  opposed.  Of  how  much  cake 
she  partook  the  letters  to  Musset  and  Sainte-Beuve 
well  show  us,  and  yet  they  fall  in  at  the  same  time,  on 
other  sides,  with  all  that  was  noble  in  her  mind,  all 
that  is  beautiful  in  the  books  just  mentioned  and  in 
the  six  volumes  of  the  general  "Correspondance:  1812- 
1876,"  out  of  which  Madame  Sand  comes  so  immensely 
to  her  advantage.  She  had,  as  liberty,  all  the  adven- 
tures of  which  the  dots  are  so  put  on  the  i's  by  the 
documents  lately  published,  and  then  she  had,  as  law, 
as  honour  and  serenity,  all  her  fine  reflections  on  them 
and  all  her  splendid  busy  literary  use  of  them.  Noth- 
ing perhaps  gives  more  relief  to  her  masculine  stamp 
than  the  rare  art  and  success  with  which  she  cultivated 
an  equilibrium.  She  made  from  beginning  to  end  a 
masterly  study  of  composure,  absolutely  refusing  to  be 
upset,  closing  her  door  at  last  against  the  very  ap- 
proach of  irritation  and  surprise.  She  had  arrived  at 
her  quiet  elastic  synthesis — a  good-humour,  an  indul- 
gence that  were  an  armour  of  proof.  The  great  felicity 
of  all  this  was  that  it  was  neither  indifference  nor  re- 
nunciation, but  on  the  contrary  an  intense  partaking; 
imagination,  affection,  sympathy  and  life,  the  way  she 


182  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

had  found  for  herself  of  living  most  and  living  longest. 
However  well  it  all  agreed  with  her  happiness  and  her 
manners,  it  agrees  still  better  with  her  style,  as  to 
which  we  come  back  with  her  to  the  sense  that  this 
was  really  her  point  d'appui  or  sustaining  force.  Most 
people  have  to  say,  especially  about  themselves,  only 
what  they  can;  but  she  said — and  we  nowhere  see  it 
better  than  in  the  letters  to  Musset — everything  in 
life  that  she  wanted.  We  can  well  imagine  the  effect 
of  that  consciousness  on  the  nerves  of  this  particular 
correspondent,  his  own  poor  gift  of  occasional  song 
(to  be  so  early  spent)  reduced  to  nothing  by  so  un- 
equalled a  command  of  the  last  word.  We  feel  it,  I 
hasten  to  add,  this  last  word,  in  all  her  letters:  the 
occasion,  no  matter  which,  gathers  it  from  her  as  the 
breeze  gathers  the  scent  from  the  garden.  It  is  always 
the  last  word  of  sympathy  and  sense,  and  we  meet  it 
on  every  page  of  the  voluminous  "Correspondance." 
These  pages  are  not  so  "clever"  as  those,  in  the  same 
order,  of  some  other  famous  hands — the  writer  always 
denied,  justly  enough,  that  she  had  either  wit  or 
presence  of  mind — and  they  are  not  a  product  of  high 
spirits  or  of  a  marked  avidity  for  gossip.  But  they 
have  admirable  ease,  breadth  and  generosity;  they 
are  the  clear  quiet  overflow  of  a  very  full  cup.  They 
speak  above  all  for  the  author's  great  gift,  her  eye  for 
the  inward  drama.  Her  hand  is  always  on  the  fiddle- 
string,  her  ear  is  always  at  the  heart.  It  was  in  the 
soul,  in  a  word,  that  she  saw  the  drama  begin,  and  to 
the  soul  that,  after  whatever  outward  flourishes,  she 
saw  it  confidently  come  back.  She  herself  lived  with 
all  her  perceptions  and  in  all  her  chambers — not 
merely  in  the  showroom  of  the  shop.  This  brings  us 
once  more  to  the  question  of  the  instrument  and  the 


GEORGE  SAND  183 

tone,  and  to  our  idea  that  the  tone,  when  you  are  so 
lucky  as  to  possess  it,  may  be  of  itself  a  solution. 

By  a  solution  I  mean  a  secret  for  saving  not  only 
your  reputation  but  your  life — that  of  your  soul;  an 
antidote  to  dangers  which  the  unendowed  can  hope  to 
escape  by  no  process  less  uncomfortable  or  less  in- 
glorious than  that  of  prudence  and  precautions.  The 
unendowed  must  go  round  about,  the  others  may  go 
straight  through  the  wood.  Their  weaknesses,  those 
of  the  others,  shall  be  as  well  redeemed  as  their  books 
shall  be  well  preserved;  it  may  almost  indeed  be  said 
that  they  are  made  wise  in  spite  of  themselves.  If 
you  have  never  in  all  your  days  had  a  weakness  worth 
mentioning,  you  can  be  after  all  no  more,  at  the  very 
most,  than  large  and  cheerful  and  imperturbable. 
All  these  things  Madame  Sand  managed  to  be  on  just 
the  terms  she  had  found,  as  we  see,  most  convenient. 
So  much,  I  repeat,  does  there  appear  to  be  in  a  tone. 
But  if  the  perfect  possession  of  one  made  her,  as  it 
well  might,  an  optimist,  the  action  of  it  is  perhaps  more 
consistently  happy  in  her  letters  and  her  personal 
records  than  in  her  "creative"  work.  Her  novels 
to-day  have  turned  rather  pale  and  faint,  as  if  the 
image  projected — not  intense,  not  absolutely  concrete 
—failed  to  reach  completely  the  mind's  eye.  And  the 
odd  point  is  that  the  wonderful  charm  of  expression  is 
not  really  a  remedy  for  this  lack  of  intensity,  but 
rather  an  aggravation  of  it  through  a  sort  of  suffusion 
of  the  whole  thing  by  the  voice  and  speech  of  the 
author.  These  things  set  the  subject,  whatever  it  be, 
afloat  in  the  upper  air,  where  it  takes  a  happy  bath  of 
brightness  and  vagueness  or  swims  like  a  soap-bubble 
kept  up  by  blowing.  This  is  no  drawback  when  she 


184  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

is  on  the  ground  of  her  own  life,  to  which  she  is  tied  by 
a  certain  number  of  tangible  threads;  but  to  embark 
on  one  of  her  confessed  fictions  is  to  have — after  all 
that  has  come  and  gone,  in  our  time,  in  the  trick  of 
persuasion — a  little  too  much  the  feeling  of  going  up 
in  a  balloon.  We  are  borne  by  a  fresh  cool  current 
and  the  car  delightfully  dangles;  but  as  we  peep  over 
the  sides  we  see  things — as  we  usually  know  them — at 
a  dreadful  drop  beneath.  Or  perhaps  a  better  way  to 
express  the  sensation  is  to  say  what  I  have  just  been 
struck  with  in  the  re-perusal  of  "Elle  et  Lui";  namely 
that  this  book,  like  others  by  the  same  hand,  affects 
the  reader — and  the  impression  is  of  the  oddest — not 
as  a  first  but  as  a  second  echo  or  edition  of  the  imme- 
diate real,  or  in  other  words  of  the  subject.  The  tale 
may  in  this  particular  be  taken  as  typical  of  the 
author's  manner;  beautifully  told,  but  told,  as  if  on 
a  last  remove  from  the  facts,  by  some  one  repeating 
what  he  has  read  or  what  he  has  had  from  another 
and  thereby  inevitably  becoming  more  general  and 
superficial,  missing  or  forgetting  the  "hard"  parts  and 
slurring  them  over  and  making  them  up.  Of  every- 
thing but  feelings  the  presentation  is  dim.  We  recog- 
nise that  we  shall  never  know  the  original  narrator 
and  that  the  actual  introducer  is  the  only  one  we  can 
deal  with.  But  we  sigh  perhaps  as  we  reflect  that  we 
may  never  confront  her  with  her  own  informant. 

To  that,  however,  we  must  resign  ourselves;  for  I 
remember  in  time  that  the  volume  from  which  I  take 
occasion  to  speak  with  this  levity  is  the  work  that  I 
began  by  pronouncing  a  precious  illustration.  With 
the  aid  of  the  disclosures  of  the  Revue  de  Paris  it  was, 
as  I  hinted,  to  show  us  that  no  mistakes  and  no  pains 


GEORGE  SAND  185 

are  too  great  to  be,  in  the  air  of  art,  triumphantly  con- 
vertible. Has  it  really  performed  this  function  ?  I 
thumb  again  my  copy  of  the  limp  little  novel  and  won- 
der what,  alas,  I  shall  reply.  The  case  is  extreme,  for 
it  was  the  case  of  a  suggestive  experience  particularly 
dire,  and  the  literary  flower  that  has  bloomed  upon  it 
is  not  quite  the  full-blown  rose.  "Oeuvre  de  ran- 
cune"  Arvede  Barine  pronounces  it,  and  if  we  take 
it  as  that  we  admit  that  the  artist's  distinctness  from 
her  material  was  not  ideally  complete.  Shall  I  not 
better  the  question  by  saying  that  it  strikes  me  less  as 
a  work  of  rancour  than — in  a  peculiar  degree — as  a 
work  of  egotism  ?  It  becomes  in  that  light  at  any  rate 
a  sufficiently  happy  affirmation  of  the  author's  in- 
fallible form.  This  form  was  never  a  more  successful 
vehicle  for  the  conveyance  of  sweet  reasonableness. 
It  is  all  superlatively  calm  and  clear;  there  never  was 
a  kinder,  balmier  last  word.  Whatever  the  measure 
of  justice  of  the  particular  representation,  moreover, 
the  picture  has  only  to  be  put  beside  the  recent  docu- 
ments, the  "study,"  as  I  may  call  them,  to  illustrate 
the  general  phenomenon.  Even  if  "Elle  et  Lui"  is 
not  the  full-blown  rose  we  have  enough  here  to  place 
in  due  relief  an  irrepressible  tendency  to  bloom.  In 
fact  I  seem  already  to  discern  that  tendency  in  the 
very  midst  of  the  storm;  the  "tone"  in  the  letters  too 
has  its  own  way  and  performs  on  its  own  account— 
which  is  but  another  manner  of  saying  that  the  literary 
instinct,  in  the  worst  shipwreck,  is  never  out  of  its 
depth.  The  worker  observed  at  the  fire  by  Merimee 
could  be  drowned  but  in  an  ocean  of  ink.  Is  that  a 
sufficient  account  of  what  I  have  called  the  laying 
bare  of  the  relation  between  experience  and  art  ?  With 
the  two  elements,  the  life  and  the  genius,  face  to  face 


i86  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

— the  smutches  and  quarrels  at  one  end  of  the  chain 
and  the  high  luminosity  at  the  other — does  some 
essential  link  still  appear  to  be  missing  ?  How  do 
the  graceless  facts  after  all  confound  themselves  with 
the  beautiful  spirit  ?  They  do  so,  incontestably,  be- 
fore our  eyes,  and  the  mystification  remains.  We  try 
to  trace  the  process,  but  before  we  break  down  we  had 
better  perhaps  hasten  to  grant  that — so  far  at  least 
as  George  Sand  is  concerned — some  of  its  steps  are 
impenetrable  secrets  of  the  grand  manner. 


GEORGE   SAND 
1899 

THOSE  among  us  comfortably  conscious  of  our  different 
usage — aware,  some  would  say,  of  our  better  conscience 
— may  well  have  remarked  the  general  absence  from 
French  practice  of  biographic  commemoration  of  ex- 
tinct worthies.  The  Life  as  we  understand  it,  the 
prompt  pious  spacious  record  and  mirror  of  the  emi- 
nent career,  rarely  follows  the  death.  The  ghost  of 
the  great  man,  when  he  happens  to  have  been  a  French- 
man, "sits"  for  such  portraiture,  we  gather,  with  a 
confidence  much  less  assured  than  among  ourselves, 
and  with  fewer  relatives  and  friends  to  surround  the 
chair.  The  manner  in  which  even  for  persons  of 
highest  mark  among  our  neighbours  biography  either 
almost  endlessly  hangs  back  or  altogether  fails,  sug- 
gests that  the  approach  is  even  when  authorised  too 
often  difficult.  This  general  attitude  toward  the  ques- 
tion, it  would  thus  appear,  implies  for  such  retrospects 
the  predominance  of  doors  bolted  and  barred.  Hes- 
itation is  therefore  fairly  logical,  for  it  rests  on  the 
assumption  that  men  and  women  of  great  gifts  will 
have  lived  with  commensurate  intensity,  and  that  as 
regards  some  of  the  forms  of  this  intensity  the  dis- 
cretion of  the  inquirer  may  well  be  the  better  part  of 
his  enthusiasm.  The  critic  can  therefore  only  note 
with  regret  so  much  absent  opportunity  for  the  play 
of  perception  and  the  art  of  composition.  The  race 
that  produced  Balzac — to  say  nothing  of  Sainte-Beuve 

187 


1 88  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

— would  surely  have  produced  a  Boswell,  a  Lockhart 
and  a  Trevelyan  if  the  fashion  had  not  set  so  strongly 
against  it.  We  have  lately  had  a  capital  example  of 
the  encounter  of  an  admirable  English  portraitist  and 
an  admirable  English  subject.  It  is  not  irrelevant 
to  cite  such  a  book  as  Mr.  Mackail's  "Life  of  William 
Morris"  as  our  high-water  mark — a  reminder  of  how 
we  may  be  blessed  on  both  faces  of  the  question.  Each 
term  of  the  combination  appears  supposable  in  France, 
but  only  as  distinct  from  the  other  term.  The  artist, 
we  gather,  would  there  have  lost  his  chance  and  the 
sitter  his  ease. 

It  completes  in  an  interesting  way  these  observa- 
tions, which  would  bear  much  expansion,  to  perceive 
that  when  we  at  last  have  a  Life  of  George  Sand — a 
celebrity  living  with  the  imputed  intensity,  if  ever  a 
celebrity  did — we  are  indebted  for  it  to  the  hand  of  a 
stranger.  No  fact  could  more  exactly  point  the  moral 
of  my  few  remarks.  Madame  Sand's  genius  and  re- 
nown would  have  long  ago  made  her  a  subject  at  home 
if  alacrity  in  such  a  connection  had  been  to  be  dreamed 
of.  There  is  no  more  significant  sign  of  the  general 
ban  under  which  alacrity  rests.  Everything  about  this 
extraordinary  woman  is  interesting,  and  we  can  easily 
imagine  the  posthumous  honours  we  ourselves  would 
have  hastened  to  assure  to  a  part  taken,  in  literature 
and  life,  with  such  brilliancy  and  sincerity.  These 
demonstrations,  where  we  should  most  look  for  them, 
have  been  none  the  less  as  naught — save  indeed,  to  be 
exact,  for  the  publication  of  a  number  of  volumes  of 
letters.  It  is  just  Madame  Sand's  letters,  however — 
letters  interesting  and  admirable,  peculiarly  qual- 
ified to  dispose  the  reader  in  her  favour — that  in  En- 


GEORGE  SAND  189 

gland  or  in  America  would  have  quickened  the  need 
for  the  rest  of  the  evidence.  But  now  that,  as  befalls, 
we  do  at  last  have  the  rest  of  the  evidence  as  we  never 
have  had  it  before,  we  are  of  course  sufficiently  en- 
lightened as  to  the  reasons  for  a  special  application 
of  the  law  of  reserves  and  delays.  It  is  not  in  fact  easy 
to  see  how  a  full  study  of  our  heroine  could  have  been 
produced  earlier;  and  even  at  present  there  is  a  sensible 
comfort  in  its  being  produced  at  such  a  distance  as 
practically  assigns  the  act  to  a  detached  posterity. 
Contemporaneously  it  was  wise  to  forbear;  but  to- 
day, and  in  Russia,  by  good  luck,  it  is  permitted  to 
plunge. 

Mme.  Wladimir  Karenine's  extraordinarily  diffuse, 
but  scarcely  less  valuable,  biography,  of  which  the 
first  instalment,1  in  two  large  volumes,  brings  the  story 
but  to  the  year  1838,  reaches  us  in  a  French  version, 
apparently  from  the  author's  own  hand,  of  chapters 
patiently  contributed  to  Russian  periodicals.  Were  it 
not  superficially  ungrateful  to  begin  with  reserves 
about  a  book  so  rich  and  full,  there  might  be  some  com- 
plaint to  make  of  this  wonderful  tribute  on  grounds 
of  form  and  taste.  Ponderous  and  prolix,  the  author 
moves  in  a  mass,  escorted  by  all  the  penalties  of  her 
indifference  to  selection  and  compression.  She  in- 
sists and  repeats,  she  wanders  wide;  her  subject  spreads 
about  her,  in  places,  as  rather  a  pathless  waste.  Above 
all  she  has  produced  a  book  which  manages  to  be  at 
once  remarkably  expert  and  singularly  provincial. 
Our  innocence  is  perhaps  at  fault,  but  we  are  moved 
to  take  the  mixture  for  characteristically  Russian. 
Would  indeed  any  but  that  admirable  "Slav"  supe- 

1  "George  Sand,  sa  Vie  et  ses  CEuvres,  1804-1876."     Paris,  1899. 


190  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

riority  to  prejudice  of  which  we  have  lately  heard  so 
much  have  availed  to  handle  the  particular  facts  in 
this  large  free  way  ?  Nothing  is  at  all  events  more 
curious  than  the  union,  on  the  part  of  our  biographer, 
of  psychological  intelligence  and  a  lame  esthetic.  The 
writer's  literary  appreciations  lag  in  other  words  half 
a  century  behind  her  human  and  social.  She  treats 
us  to  endless  disquisitions  on  pages  of  her  author  to 
which  we  are  no  longer  in  any  manageable  relation 
at  all — disquisitions  pathetic,  almost  grotesque,  in  their 
misplaced  good  faith.  But  her  attitude  to  her  sub- 
ject is  admirable,  her  thoroughness  exemplary,  the 
spirit  of  service  in  her  of  the  sort  that  builds  the  mon- 
ument stone  by  stone.  When  we  see  it  reared  to  the 
summit,  as  we  are  clearly  to  do,  we  shall  feel  the 
structure  to  be  solid  if  not  shapely.  Nothing  is  more 
possible  meanwhile  than  that  a  culture  more  homoge- 
neous— a  French  hand  or  a  German — could  not  have 
engaged  in  the  work  with  anything  like  the  same  sin- 
cerity. An  English  hand — and  the  fact,  for  our  cul- 
ture, means  much — would  have  been  incapable  of 
touching  it.  The  present  scale  of  it  at  all  events  is 
certainly  an  exotic  misconception.  But  we  can  take 
of  it  what  concerns  us. 

The  whole  thing  of  course,  we  promptly  reflect, 
concerns  at  the  best  only  those  of  us  who  can  remount 
a  little  the  stream  of  time.  The  author  of  "L'Histoire 
de  ma  Vie"  died  in  1876,  and  the  light  of  actuality 
rests  to-day  on  very  different  heads.  It  may  seem  to 
belittle  her  to  say  that  to  care  for  her  at  all  one  must 
have  cared  for  her  from  far  back,  for  such  is  not  in 
general  the  proviso  we  need  to  make  on  behalf  of  the 
greatest  figures.  It  describes  Madame  Sand  with 


GEORGE  SAND  191 

breadth,  but  not  with  extravagance,  to  speak  of  her 
as  a  sister  to  Goethe,  and  we  feel  that  for  Goethe  it 
can  never  be  too  late  to  care.  But  the  case  exempli- 
fies perhaps  precisely  the  difference  even  in  the  most 
brilliant  families  between  sisters  and  brothers.  She 
was  to  have  the  family  spirit,  but  she  was  to  receive 
from  the  fairies  who  attended  at  her  cradle  the  silver 
cup,  not  the  gold.  She  was  to  write  a  hundred  books 
but  she  was  not  to  write  "Faust."  She  was  to  have 
all  the  distinction  but  not  all  the  perfection;  and  there 
could  be  no  better  instance  of  the  degree  in  which  a 
woman  may  achieve  the  one  and  still  fail  of  the  other. 
When  it  is  a  question  of  the  rare  originals  who  have 
either  she  confirms  us,  masculine  as  she  is,  in  believing 
that  it  takes  a  still  greater  masculinity  to  have  both. 
What  she  had,  however,  she  had  in  profusion;  she 
was  one  of  the  deepest  voices  of  that  great  mid-century 
concert  against  the  last  fine  strains  of  which  we  are 
more  and  more  banging  the  doors.  Her  work,  beau- 
tiful, plentiful  and  fluid,  has  floated  itself  out  to  sea 
even  as  the  melting  snows  of  the  high  places  are  floated. 
To  feel  how  she  has  passed  away  as  a  "creator"  is  to 
feel  anew  the  immense  waste  involved  in  the  general 
ferment  of  an  age,  and  how  much  genius  and  beauty, 
let  alone  the  baser  parts  of  the  mixture,  it  takes  to 
produce  a  moderate  quantity  of  literature.  Smaller 
people  have  conceivably  ceased  to  count;  but  it  is 
strange  for  a  member  of  the  generation  immediately 
succeeding  her  own  that  she  should  have  had  the 
same  fate  as  smaller  people:  all  the  more  that  such 
a  mourner  may  be  ruefully  conscious  of  contributing 
not  a  little  himself  to  the  mishap.  Does  he  still  read, 
re-read,  can  he  to-day  at  all  deal  with,  this  wonderful 
lady's  novels  ?  It  only  half  cheers  him  up  that  on  the 


192  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

occasion  of  such  a  publication  as  I  here  speak  of  he 
finds  himself  as  much  interested  as  ever. 

The  grounds  of  the  interest  are  difficult  to  give — 
they  presuppose  so  much  of  the  old  impression.  If 
the  old  impression  therefore  requires  some  art  to  sus- 
tain and  justify  itself  we  must  be  content,  so  far  as  we 
are  still  under  the  charm,  to  pass,  though  only  at  the 
worst,  for  eccentric.  The  work,  whether  we  still  hold 
fast  to  it  or  not,  has  twenty  qualities  and  would  still 
have  an  immense  one  if  it  had  only  its  style;  but  what 
I  suppose  it  has  paid  for  in  the  long-run  is  its  want  of 
plastic  intensity.  Does  any  work  of  representation, 
of  imitation,  live  long  that  is  predominantly  loose  ? 
It  may  live  in  spite  of  looseness;  but  that,  we  make  out, 
is  only  because  closeness  has  somewhere,  where  it  has 
most  mattered,  played  a  part.  It  is  hard  to  say  of 
George  Sand's  productions,  I  think,  that  they  show 
closeness  anywhere;  the  sense  of  that  fluidity  which 
is  more  than  fluency  is  what,  in  speaking  of  them,  con- 
stantly comes  back  to  us,  and  the  sense  of  fluidity  is 
fundamentally  fatal  to  the  sense  of  particular  truth. 
The  thing  presented  by  intention  is  never  the  stream  of 
the  artist's  inspiration;  it  is  the  deposit  of  the  stream. 
For  the  things  presented  by  George  Sand,  for  the  gen- 
eral picture,  we  must  look  elsewhere,  look  at  her  life 
and  her  nature,  and  find  them  in  the  copious  docu- 
ments in  which  these  matters  and  many  others  are 
now  reflected.  All  this  mass  of  evidence  it  is  that 
constitutes  the  "intensity"  we  demand.  The  mass 
has  little  by  little  become  large,  and  our  obligation 
to  Madame  Karenine  is  that  she  makes  it  still  larger. 
She  sets  our  face,  and  without  intending  to,  more  and 
more  in  the  right  direction.  Her  injudicious  analyses 


GEORGE  SAND  193 

of  forgotten  fictions  only  confirm  our  discrimination. 
We  feel  ourselves  in  the  presence  of  the  extraordinary 
author  of  the  hundred  tales,  and  yet  also  feel  it  to  be 
not  by  reason  of  them  that  she  now  presents  herself 
as  one  of  the  most  remarkable  of  human  creatures. 
By  reason  then  of  what  ?  Of  everything  that  deter- 
mined, accompanied,  surrounded  their  appearance. 
They  formed  all  together  a  great  feature  in  a  career 
and  a  character,  but  the  career  and  the  character  are 
the  real  thing. 

Such  is  far  from  usually  the  case,  I  hasten  to  recog- 
nise, with  the  complete  and  consistent  artist.  Poor 
is  the  art,  a  thing  positively  to  be  ashamed  of,  that, 
generally  speaking,  is  not  far  more  pressing  for  this 
servant  of  the  altar  than  anything  else,  anything  out- 
side the  church,  can  possibly  be.  To  have  been  the 
tempered  and  directed  hammer  that  makes  the  metal 
hard:  if  that  be  not  good  enough  for  such  a  ministrant, 
we  may  know  him  by  whatever  he  has  found  better 
— we  shall  not  know  him  by  the  great  name.  The 
immense  anomaly  in  Madame  Sand  was  that  she  freely 
took  the  form  of  being,  with  most  zest,  quite  another 
sort  of  hammer.  It  testifies  sufficiently  to  her  large 
endowment  that,  given  the  wide  range  of  the  rest  of 
her  appetite,  she  should  seem  to  us  to-day  to  have 
sacrificed  even  superficially  to  any  form  of  objective 
expression.  She  had  in  spite  of  herself  an  imagina- 
tion almost  of  the  first  order,  which  overflowed  and 
irrigated,  turning  by  its  mere  swift  current,  without 
effort,  almost  without  direction,  every  mill  it  encoun- 
tered, and  launching  as  it  went  alike  the  lightest  skiff 
and  the  stateliest  ship.  She  had  in  especial  the  gift 
of  speech,  speech  supreme  and  inspired,  to  which  we 


i94  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

particularly  owe  the  high  value  of  the  "case"  she  pre- 
sents. For  the  case  was  definitely  a  bold  and  direct 
experiment,  not  at  all  in  "art,"  not  at  all  in  literature, 
but  conspicuously  and  repeatedly  in  the  business  of 
living;  so  that  our  profit  of  it  is  before  anything  else 
that  it  was  conscious,  articulate,  vivid — recorded,  re- 
flected, imaged.  The  subject  of  the  experiment  be- 
came also  at  first  hand  the  journalist — much  of  her 
work  being  simply  splendid  journalism — commissioned 
to  bring  it  up  to  date.  She  interviewed  nobody  else, 
but  she  admirably  interviewed  herself,  and  this  is 
exactly  our  good  fortune.  Her  autobiography,  her 
letters,  her  innumerable  prefaces,  all  her  expansive 
parentheses  and  excursions,  make  up  the  generous 
report.  We  have  in  this  form  accordingly  a  literary 
title  for  her  far  superseding  any  derived  from  her 
creative  work.  But  that  is  the  result  of  a  mere  be- 
trayal, not  the  result  of  an  intention.  Her  master- 
piece, by  a  perversity  of  fate,  is  the  thing  she  least  sat 
down  to.  It  consists — since  she  is  a  case — in  the  mere 
notation  of  her  symptoms,  in  help  given  to  the  study 
of  them.  To  this  has  the  author  of  "Consuelo"  come. 

But  how  in  the  world  indeed  was  the  point  so  in- 
dicated not  to  be  the  particular  cross-road  at  which  the 
critic  should  lie  in  wait  for  a  poor  child  of  the  age 
whom  preceding  ages  and  generations  had  almost  in- 
fernally conspired  to  trap  for  him,  to  give  up,  candidly 
astray,  to  his  hands  ?  If  the  element  of  romance  for 
which  our  heroine's  name  stands  is  best  represented 
by  her  personal  sequences  and  solutions,  it  is  sufficiently 
visible  that  her  heredity  left  her  a  scant  alternative. 
Space  fails  me  for  the  story  of  this  heredity,  queer  and 
complicated,  the  very  stuff*  that  stories  are  made  of — 


GEORGE  SAND  195 

a  chain  of  generations  succeeding  each  other  in  con- 
fidence and  joy  and  with  no  aid  asked  of  legal  or  other 
artificial  sanctions.  The  facts  are,  moreover,  suffi- 
ciently familiar,  though  here  as  elsewhere  Madame 
Karenine  adds  to  our  knowledge.  Presented,  fore- 
shortened, stretching  back  from  the  quiet  Nohant 
funeral  of  1876  to  the  steps  of  the  throne  of  King 
Augustus  the  Strong  of  Poland,  father  of  Maurice  de 
Saxe,  great-great-grandfather  of  Aurore  Dupin,  it  all 
hangs  together  as  a  cluster  of  components  more  provoc- 
ative than  any  the  great  novelist  herself  ever  handled. 
Her  pre-natal  past  was  so  peopled  with  dramatis 
persona  that  her  future  was  really  called  on  to  supply 
them  in  such  numbers  as  would  preserve  the  balance. 
The  tide  of  illegitimacy  sets  straight  through  the 
series.  No  one  to  speak  of — Aurore's  father  is  an  ex- 
ception— seems  to  have  had  a  "regular"  paternity. 
Aurore  herself  squared  with  regularity  but  by  a  month 
or  two;  the  marriage  of  her  parents  gave  her  a  bare 
escape.  She  was  brought  up  by  her  paternal  grand- 
mother between  a  son  of  her  father  and  a  daughter  of 
her  mother  born  out  of  wedlock.  It  all  moves  before 
us  as  a  vivid  younger  world,  a  world  on  the  whole  more 
amused  and  more  amusing  than  ours.  The  period 
from  the  Restoration  to  the  events  of  1848  is  the 
stretch  of  time  in  which,  for  more  reasons  than  we  can 
now  go  into,  French  life  gives  out  to  those  to  whom 
its  appeal  never  fails  most  of  its  charm — most,  at  all 
events,  of  its  ancient  sociability.  Happy  is  our  sense 
of  the  picturesque  Paris  unconscious  of  a  future  all 
"avenues"  and  exhibitions;  happy  our  sense  of  these 
middle  years  of  a  great  generation,  easy  and  lusty 
despite  the  ensanguined  spring  that  had  gone  before. 
They  live  again,  piecing  themselves  ever  so  pleasantly 


196  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

and  strangely  together,  in  Madame  Sand's  records 
and  references;  almost  as  much  as  the  conscious  close 
of  the  old  regime  so  vaunted  by  Talleyrand  they  strike 
us  as  a  season  it  would  have  been  indispensable  to 
know  for  the  measure  of  what  intercourse  could  richly 
be. 

The  time  was  at  any  rate  unable  to  withhold  from 
the  wonderful  young  person  growing  up  at  Nohant 
the  conditions  she  was  so  freely  to  use  as  measures  of 
her  own.  Though  the  motto  of  her  autobiography 
is  Wahrheit  und  Dichtung  quite  as  much  as  it  had  been 
that  of  Goethe's,  there  is  a  truth  beyond  any  pro- 
jected by  her  more  regular  compositions  in  her  evoca- 
tion of  the  influences  of  her  youth.  Upon  these  in- 
fluences Madame  Karenine,  who  has  enjoyed  access 
through  her  heroine's  actual  representatives  to  much 
evidence  hitherto  unpublished,  throws  a  hundred 
interesting  lights.  Madame  Dupin  de  Francueil  and 
Madame  Dupin  the  younger  survive  and  perform  for 
us,  "convince"  us  as  we  say,  better  than  any  Lelia 
or  any  Consuelo.  Our  author's  whole  treatment  of 
her  remarkable  mother's  figure  and  history  conve- 
niently gives  the  critic  the  pitch  of  the  great  fact  about 
her — the  formation  apparently  at  a  given  moment, 
yet  in  very  truth,  we  may  be  sure,  from  far  back,  of 
the  capacity  and  the  determination  to  live  with  high 
consistency  for  herself.  What  she  made  of  this  re- 
solve to  allow  her  nature  all  its  chances  and  how  she 
carried  on  the  process — these  things  are,  thanks  to  the 
immense  illustration  her  genius  enabled  her  to  lend 
them,  the  essence  of  her  story;  of  which  the  full 
adumbration  is  in  the  detached  pictorial  way  she 
causes  her  mother  to  live  for  us.  Motherhood,  daugh- 


GEORGE  SAND  197 

terhood,  childhood,  embarrassed  maturity,  were  phe- 
nomena she  early  encountered  in  her  great  adventure, 
and  nothing  is  more  typical  of  her  energy  and  sincerity 
than  the  short  work  we  can  scarce  help  feeling  she 
makes  of  them.  It  is  not  that  she  for  a  moment 
blinks  or  dodges  them;  she  weaves  them  straight  in 
— embarks  with  them  indeed  as  her  principal  baggage. 
We  know  to-day  from  the  pages  before  us  everything 
we  need  to  know  about  her  marriage  and  the  troubled 
years  that  followed;  about  M.  Casimir  Dudevant 
and  his  possible  points  of  view,  about  her  separation, 
her  sharp  secession,  rather,  as  it  first  presents  itself, 
and  her  discovery,  at  a  turn  of  the  road  as  it  can  only 
be  called,  of  her  genius. 

She  stumbled  on  this  principle,  we  see,  quite  by 
accident  and  as  a  consequence  of  the  attempt  to  do  the 
very  humblest  labour,  to  support  herself  from  day  to 
day.  It  would  be  difficult  to  put  one's  finger  more 
exactly  upon  a  case  of  genius  unaided  and  unprompted. 
She  embarked,  as  I  have  called  it,  on  her  great  voyage 
with  no  grounds  of  confidence  whatever;  she  had 
obscurely,  unwittingly  the  spirit  of  Columbus,  but  not 
so  much  even  as  his  exiguous  outfit.  She  found  her 
gift  of  improvisation,  found  her  tropic  wealth,  by  leap- 
ing— a  surprised  conquistador  of  "style" — straight  upon 
the  coral  strand.  No  awakened  instinct,  probably,  was 
ever  such  a  blessing  to  a  writer  so  much  in  need.  This 
instinct  was  for  a  long  time  all  her  initiation,  practi- 
cally all  her  equipment.  The  curious  thing  is  that 
she  never  really  arrived  at  the  fruit  of  it  as  the  result 
of  a  process,  but  that  she  started  with  the  whole  thing 
as  a  Patti  or  a  Mario  starts  with  a  voice  which  is  a 
method,  which  is  music,  and  that  it  was  simply  the 


i98  v     NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

train  in  which  she  travelled.  It  was  to  render  her 
as  great  a  service  as  any  supreme  faculty  ever  ren- 
dered its  possessor,  quite  the  same  service  as  the  stra- 
tegic eye  renders  a  commander  in  the  field  or  instant 
courage  the  attacking  soldier:  it  was  to  carry  her 
through  life  still  more  inimitably  than  through  the 
career  of  authorship.  Her  books  are  all  rich  and 
resonant  with  it,  but  they  profit  by  it  meagrely  com- 
pared with  her  character.  She  walks  from  first  to 
last  in  music,  that  is  in  literary  harmonies,  of  her  own 
making,  and  it  is  in  truth  sometimes  only,  with  her 
present  biographer  to  elbow  us  a  little  the  way,  that 
these  triumphant  sounds  permit  us  a  near  enough 
approach  to  the  procession  to  make  out  quite  exactly 
its  course. 

No  part  of  her  career  is  to  my  sense  so  curious  as 
this  particular  sudden  bound  into  the  arena.  Noth- 
ing but  the  indescribable  heredity  I  have  spoken  of 
appears  traceably  to  have  prepared  it.  We  have  on 
one  side  the  mere  poverty  and  provinciality  of  her 
marriage  and  her  early  contacts,  the  crudity  of  her 
youth  and  her  ignorance  (which  included  so  small  a 
view  of  herself  that  she  had  begun  by  looking  for  a 
future  in  the  bedaubing,  for  fancy-shops,  of  little 
boxes  and  fans);  and  on  the  other,  at  a  stride,  the  full- 
blown distinction  of  "Valentine"  and  "Jacques," 
which  had  had  nothing  to  lead  up  to  it,  we  seem  to 
make  out,  but  the  very  rough  sketch  of  a  love-affair 
with  M.  Jules  Sandeau.  I  spoke  just  now  of  the  pos- 
sible points  of  view  of  poor  M.  Dudevant;  at  which, 
had  we  space,  it  might  be  of  no  small  amusement  to 
glance — of  an  amusement  indeed  large  and  suggestive. 
We  see  him,  surely,  in  the  light  of  these  records,  as  the 


GEORGE  SAND  199 

most  "sold"  husband  in  literature,  and  not  at  all,  one 
feels,  by  his  wife's  assertion  of  her  freedom,  but  sim- 
ply by  her  assertion  of  her  mind.  He  appears  to 
have  married  her  for  a  nobody  approved  and  guaran- 
teed, and  he  found  her,  on  his  hands,  a  sister,  as  we 
have  seen,  of  Goethe — unless  it  be  but  a  figure  to  say 
that  he  ever  "found"  her  anything.  He  appears  to 
have  lived  to  an  advanced  age  without  having  really 
— in  spite  of  the  lawsuits  he  lost — comprehended  his 
case;  not  the  least  singular  feature  of  which  had  in 
fact  positively  been  the  deceptive  delay  of  his  fate. 
It  was  not  till  after  several  years  of  false  calm  that  it 
presented  itself  in  its  special  form.  We  see  him  and  his 
so  ruthlessly  superseded  name,  never  to  be  gilded  by 
the  brilliant  event,  we  see  him  reduced,  like  a  leaf  in  a 
whirlwind,  to  a  mere  vanishing-point. 

We  deal  here,  I  think,  with  something  very  differ- 
ent from  the  usual  tittle-tattle  about  "private"  rela- 
tions, for  the  simple  reason  that  we  deal  with  relations 
foredoomed  to  publicity  by  the  strange  economy  in- 
volved in  the  play  of  genius  itself.  Nothing  was  ever 
less  wasted,  from  beginning  to  end,  than  all  this  amo- 
rous experience  and  all  this  luxury  of  woe.  The  parties 
to  it  were  to  make  an  inveterate  use  of  it,  the  principal 
party  most  of  all;  and  what  therefore  on  that  marked 
ground  concerns  the  critic  is  to  see  what  they  were  ap- 
preciably to  get  out  of  it.  The  principal  party,  the 
constant  one  through  all  mutations,  was  alone  qual- 
ified to  produce  the  extract  that  affects  us  as  final. 
It  was  by  the  publication  four  years  since  of  her  letters 
to  Alfred  de  Musset  and  to  Sainte-Beuve,  by  the  ap- 
pearance also  of  Madame  Arvede  Barine's  clear  com- 
pact biography  of  Musset,  that  we  began  to  find  her 


200  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

personal  history  brought  nearer  to  us  than  her  own 
communications  had  in  her  lifetime  already  brought  it. 
The  story  of  her  relations  with  Musset  is  accordingly 
so  known  that  I  need  only  glance  at  the  fact  of  her 
having — shortly  after  the  highest  degree  of  intimacy 
between  them  had,  in  the  summer  of  1833,  established 
itself  in  Paris — travelled  with  him  to  Italy,  settled 
with  him  briefly  in  Venice,  and  there  passionately 
quarrelled  and  parted  with  him — only,  however,  sev- 
eral months  later,  on  their  return  to  France,  to  renew 
again,  to  quarrel  and  to  part  again,  all  more  passion- 
ately, if  possible,  even  than  before.  Madame  Karenine, 
besides  supplying  us  with  all  added  light  on  this 
episode,  keeps  us  abreast  of  others  that  were  to  follow, 
leaves  us  no  more  in  the  dark  about  Michel  de  Bourges, 
Felicien  Mallefille  and  Chopin  than  we  had  already 
been  left  about  their  several  predecessors.  She  is 
commendably  lucid  on  the  subject  of  Franz  Liszt, 
impartially  examines  the  case  and  authoritatively 
dismisses  it.  Her  second  volume  brings  her  heroine 
to  the  eve  of  the  historic  departure  with  Chopin  for 
Majorca.  We  have  thus  in  a  convenient  form  enough 
for  one  mouthful  of  entertainment,  as  well  as  for 
superabundant  reflection. 

We  have  indeed  the  whole  essence  of  what  most 
touches  us,  for  this  consists  not  at  all  of  the  quantity 
of  the  facts,  nor  even  of  their  oddity:  they  are  prac- 
tically all  there  from  the  moment  the  heroine's  general 
attitude  defines  itself.  That  is  the  solid  element — 
the  details  to-day  are  smoke.  Yet  I  hasten  to  add 
that  it  was  in  particular  by  taking  her  place  of  an  au- 
tumn evening  in  the  southward-moving  diligence  with 
Alfred  de  Musset,  it  was  on  this  special  occasion  that 


GEORGE  SAND  201 

she  gave  most  the  measure  of  her  choice  of  the  con- 
sistent, even  though  it  so  little  meant  the  consequent, 
life.  She  had  reached  toward  such  a  life  obviously 
in  quitting  the  conjugal  roof  in  1831 — had  attacked 
the  experiment  clumsily,  but  according  to  her  light, 
by  throwing  herself  on  such  material  support  as  fac- 
ulties yet  untested  might  furnish,  and  on  such  moral 
as  several  months  of  the  intimite  of  Jules  Sandeau  and 
a  briefer  taste  of  that  of  Prosper  Merimee  might  fur- 
ther contribute.  She  had  done,  in  other  words,  what 
she  could;  subsequent  lights  show  it  as  not  her  fault 
that  she  had  not  done  better.  With  Musset  her 
future  took  a  long  stride;  emotionally  speaking  it 
"looked  up."  Nothing  was  wanting  in  this  case — 
independently  of  what  might  then  have  appeared  her 
friend's  equal  genius — quite  ideally  to  qualify  it.  He 
was  several  years  her  junior,  and  as  she  had  her  hus- 
band and  her  children,  he  had,  in  the  high  degree  of 
most  young  Frenchmen  of  sensibility,  his  mother.  It 
is  recorded  that  with  this  lady  on  the  eve  of  the  cel- 
ebrated step  she  quite  had  the  situation,  as  the  phrase 
is,  out;  which  is  a  note  the  more  in  the  general,  the 
intellectual  lucidity.  The  only  other  note  in  fact  to 
be  added  is  that  of  the  absence  of  funds  for  the  under- 
taking. Neither  partner  had  a  penny  to  spare;  the 
plan  was  wholly  to  "make  money,"  on  a  scale,  as  they 
went.  A  great  deal  was  in  the  event,  exactly  speak- 
ing, to  be  made — but  the  event  was  at  the  time  far  from 
clear  to  them.  The  enterprise  was  in  consequence 
purely  and  simply,  with  a  rounded  perfection  that 
gives  it  its  value  for  the  critic,  an  affair  of  the  heart. 
That  the  heart,  taking  it  as  a  fully  representative 
organ,  should  fail  of  no  good  occasion  completely  and 
consistently  to  engage  itself  was  the  definite  and,  as 


202  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

appeared,  the  promising  assumption  on  which  every- 
thing rested.  The  heart  was  real  life,  frank,  fearless, 
intelligent  and  even,  so  far  as  might  be,  intelligible 
life;  everything  else  was  stupid  as  well  as  poor,  mud- 
dle as  well  as  misery.  The  heart  of  course  might  be 
misery,  for  nothing  was  more  possible  than  that  life 
predominantly  was;  but  it  was  at  all  events  the  misery 
that  is  least  ignoble. 

This  was  the  basis  of  Madame  Sand's  personal 
evolution,  of  her  immense  moral  energy,  for  many  a 
year;  it  was  a  practical  system,  applied  and  reapplied, 
and  no  "inquiry"  concerning  her  has  much  point  save 
as  settling  what,  for  our  enlightenment  and  our  es- 
teem, she  made  of  it.  The  answer  meets  us,  I  think, 
after  we  have  taken  in  the  facts,  promptly  enough  and 
with  great  clearness,  so  long  as  we  consider  that  it  is 
not,  that  it  cannot  be  in  the  conditions,  a  simple  one. 
She  made  of  it  then  intellectually  a  splendid  living, 
but  she  was  able  to  do  this  only  because  she  was  an 
altogether  exceptional  example  of  our  human  stuff. 
It  is  here  that  her  famous  heredity  comes  in:  we  see 
what  a  race-accumulation  of  "toughness"  had  been 
required  to  build  her  up.  Monstrous  monarchs  and 
bastards  of  kings,  great  generals  and  bastards  of 
bastards,  courtesans,  dancers  supple  and  hard,  accom- 
plished men  and  women  of  the  old  dead  great  world, 
seasoned  young  soldiers  of  the  Imperial  epic,  grisettes 
of  the  pave  de  Paris,  Parisian  to  the  core;  the  mixture 
was  not  quite  the  blood  of  people  in  general,  and  ob- 
viously such  a  final  flower  of  such  a  stem  might  well 
fix  the  attention  and  appeal  to  the  vigilance  of  those 
qualified  to  watch  its  development.  These  persons 
would,  doubtless,  however,  as  a  result  of  their  obser- 


GEORGE  SAND  203 

vation,  have  acquired  betimes  a  sense  of  the  high 
vitality  of  their  young  friend.  Formed  essentially  for 
independence  and  constructed  for  resistance  and  sur- 
vival she  was  to  be  trusted,  as  I  have  hinted,  to  take 
care  of  herself:  this  was  always  the  residuary  fact  when 
a  passion  was  spent.  She  took  care  of  Musset,  she 
took  care  of  Chopin,  took  care,  in  short,  through  her 
career,  of  a  whole  series  of  nurslings,  but  never  failed, 
under  the  worst  ingratitude,  to  be  by  her  own  elasticity 
still  better  taken  care  of.  This  is  why  we  call  her 
anomalous  and  deprecate  any  view  of  her  success  that 
loses  sight  of  the  anomaly.  The  success  was  so  great 
that  but  for  the  remainder  she  would  be  too  encourag- 
ing. She  was  one  in  a  myriad,  and  the  cluster  of  cir- 
cumstances is  too  unlikely  to  recur. 

It  is  by  her  success,  none  the  less,  we  must  also  re- 
member, that  we  know  her;  it  is  this  that  makes  her 
interesting  and  calls  for  study.  She  had  all  the  illu- 
mination that  sensibility,  that  curiosity,  can  give,  and 
that  so  ingeniously  induces  surrender  to  it;  but  the  too 
numerous  weaknesses,  vulgarities  and  penalties  of  ad- 
venture and  surrender  she  had  only  in  sufficient  degree 
to  complete  the  experience  before  they  shaped  them- 
selves into  the  eloquence  into  which  she  could  always 
reascend.  Her  eloquence — it  is  the  simplest  way  to 
explain  her — fairly  made  her  success;  and  eloquence 
is  superlatively  rare.  When  passion  can  always  de- 
pend upon  it  to  vibrate  passion  becomes  to  that  extent 
action,  and  success  is  nothing  but  action  repeated  and 
confirmed.  In  Madame  Sand's  particular  case  the 
constant  recurrence  of  the  malady  of  passion  promoted 
in  the  most  extraordinary  way  the  superior  appearance, 
the  general  expression,  of  health.  It  is  of  course  not 


204  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  be  denied  that  there  are  in  her  work  infirmities  and 
disfigurements,  odd  smutches  even,  or  unwitting  droll- 
eries, which  show  a  sense  on  some  sides  enfeebled. 
The  sense  of  her  characters  themselves  for  instance  is 
constantly  a  confused  one;  they  are  too  often  at  sea 
as  to  what  is  possible  and  what  impossible  for  what 
we  roughly  call  decent  people.  Her  own  categories, 
loose  and  liberal,  are  yet  ever  positive  enough;  when 
they  err  it  is  by  excess  of  indulgence  and  by  absence 
of  the  humorous  vision,  a  nose  for  the  ridiculous — the 
fatal  want,  this  last  almost  always,  we  are  reminded, 
the  heel  of  Achilles,  in  the  sentimental,  the  romantic 
estimate.  The  general  validity  of  her  novels,  at  any 
rate,  I  leave  impugned,  and  the  feature  I  have  just 
noted  in  them  is  but  one  of  the  points  at  which  they 
fail  of  reality.  I  stick  to  the  history  of  her  personal 
experiment,  as  the  now  so  numerous  documents  show 
it;  for  it  is  here,  and  here  only,  that  her  felicity  is 
amusing  and  confounding;  amusing  by  the  quaintness 
of  some  of  the  facts  exposed,  and  yet  confounding  by 
reason  of  the  beauty  mixed  with  them. 

The  " affair"  with  Musset  for  example  has  come  to 
figure,  thanks  to  the  talent  of  both  parties,  as  one  of 
the  great  affairs  in  the  history  of  letters;  and  yet  on 
the  near  view  of  it  now  enjoyed  we  learn  that  it 
dragged  out  scarce  more  than  a  year.  Even  this 
measure  indeed  is  excessive,  so  far  as  any  measure 
serves  amid  so  much  that  is  incoherent.  It  supposed 
itself  to  have  dropped  for  upwards  of  six  months, 
during  which  another  connection,  another  imperious 
heart-history,  reigned  in  its  stead.  The  enumeration 
of  these  trifles  is  not,  I  insist,  futile;  so  that  while  we 
are  about  it  we  shall  find  an  interest  in  being  clear. 


GEORGE  SAND  205 

The  events  of  Venice,  with  those  that  immediately  pre- 
ceded and  followed  them,  distinctly  repay  inspection 
as  an  epitome,  taken  together,  of  the  usual  process. 
They  appear  to  contain,  as  well  as  an  intensity  all 
their  own,  the  essence  of  all  that  of  other  occasions. 
The  young  poet  and  the  young  novelist  met  then, 
appear  to  have  met  for  the  first  time,  toward  the  end 
of  June  1833,  and  to  have  become  finally  intimate  in 
the  month  of  August  of  that  year.  They  started  to- 
gether for  Italy  at  the  beginning  of  the  winter  and 
were  settled — if  settled  be  not  too  odd  a  word  to  use- 
by  the  end  of  January  in  Venice.  I  neglect  the  ques- 
tion of  Musset's  serious  illness  there,  though  it  is  not 
the  least  salient  part  of  the  adventure,  and  observe 
simply  that  by  the  end  of  March  he  had  started  to 
return  to  Paris,  while  his  friend,  remaining  behind, 
had  yielded  to  a  new  affection.  This  new  affection, 
the  connection  with  Pietro  Pagello,  dates  unmistak- 
ably from  before  Musset's  departure;  and,  with  the 
completion  of  "Jacques"  and  the  composition  of  the 
beautiful  "Andre,"  the  wonderful  "Leone-Leoni"  and 
some  of  the  most  interesting  of  the  "Lettres  d'un 
Voyageur,"  constituted  the  main  support  of  our  hero- 
ine during  the  spring  and  early  summer.  By  midsum- 
mer she  had  left  Italy  with  Pagello,  and  they  arrive  in 
Paris  on  August  I4th.  This  arrival  marks  imme- 
diately the  term  of  their  relations,  which  had  by  that 
time  lasted  some  six  or  seven  months.  Pagello  returned 
to  Italy,  and  if  they  ever  met  again  it  was  the  merest 
of  meetings  and  after  long  years. 

In  October,  meanwhile,  the  connection  with  Musset 
was  renewed,  and  renewed — this  is  the  great  point— 
because  the  sentiments  still  entertained  by  each   (in 


206  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

spite  of  Pagello,  in  spite  of  everything)  are  stronger 
even  than  any  awkwardness  of  which  either  might  have 
been  conscious.  The  whole  business  really  is  one  in 
which  we  lose  our  measure  alike  of  awkwardness  and 
of  grace.  The  situation  is  in  the  hands  of  comedy— 
or  would  be,  I  should  rather  say,  were  it  not  so  dis- 
tinctly predestined  to  fall,  as  I  have  noted,  into  those 
of  the  nobler  form.  It  is  prolonged  till  the  following 
February,  we  make  out,  at  furthest,  and  only  after 
having  been  more  than  once  in  the  interval  threatened 
with  violent  extinction.  It  bequeaths  us  thus  in  a 
handful  of  dates  a  picture  than  which  probably  none 
other  in  the  annals  of  "passion"  was  ever  more  sug- 
gestive. The  passion  is  of  the  kind  that  is  called 
"immortal" — and  so  called,  wonderful  to  say,  with 
infinite  reason  and  justice.  The  poems,  the  letters, 
the  diaries,  the  novels,  the  unextinguished  accents 
and  lingering  echoes  that  commemorate  it  are  among 
the  treasures  of  the  human  imagination.  The  lit- 
erature of  the  world  is  appreciably  the  richer  for  it. 
The  noblest  forms,  in  a  word,  on  both  sides,  marked 
it  for  their  own;  it  was  born,  according  to  the  adage, 
with  a  silver  spoon  in  its  mouth.  It  was  an  affection 
in  short  transcendent  and  sublime,  and  yet  the  critic 
sees  it  come  and  go  before  he  can  positively  turn 
round.  The  brief  period  of  some  seventeen  or  eight- 
een months  not  only  affords  it  all  its  opportunity,  but 
places  comfortably  in  its  lap  a  relation  founded  on  the 
same  elements  and  yet  wholly  distinct  from  it.  Mus- 
set  occupied  in  fact  but  two-thirds  of  his  mistress's 
time.  Pagello  overlapped  him  because  Pagello  also 
appealed  to  the  heart;  but  Pagello's  appeal  to  the  heart 
was  disposed  of  as  expeditiously.  Musset,  in  the  same 
way,  succeeded  Pagello  at  the  voice  of  a  similar  appeal, 


GEORGE  SAND  207 

and  this  claim,  in  its  turn,  was  polished  off  in  yet 
livelier  fashion. 

Liveliness  is  of  course  the  tune  of  the  "gay"  career; 
it  has  always  been  supposed  to  relegate  to  comedy  the 
things  to  which  it  puts  its  mark — so  that  as  a  series  of 
sequences  amenable  mainly  to  satire  the  approxima- 
tions I  have  made  would  fall  neatly  into  place.  The 
anomaly  here,  as  on  other  occasions  of  the  same  sort 
depicted  in  Madame  Karenine's  volumes,  is  that  the 
facts,  as  we  are  brought  near  to  them,  strike  us  as  so 
out  of  relation  to  the  beautiful  tone.  The  effect  and 
the  achieved  dignity  are  those  of  tragedy — tragedy 
rearranging,  begetting  afresh,  in  its  own  interest,  all 
the  elements  of  ecstasy  and  despair.  How  can  it  not 
be  tragedy  when  this  interest  is  just  the  interest,  which 
I  have  touched  on,  of  exemplary  eloquence  ?  There 
are  lights  in  which  the  material,  with  its  want  of  noble- 
ness, want  of  temper,  want  even  of  manners,  seems 
scarcely  life  at  all,  as  the  civilised  conscience  under- 
stands life;  and  yet  it  is  as  the  most  magnanimous  of 
surrenders  to  life  that  the  whole  business  is  trium- 
phantly reflected  in  the  documents.  It  is  not  only  that 
"La  Nuit  d'Octobre"  is  divine,  that  Madame  Sand's 
letters  are  superb  and  that  nothing  can  exceed,  in  par- 
ticular, the  high  style  of  the  passage  that  we  now  per- 
ceive Musset  to  have  borrowed  from  one  of  them  for 
insertion  in  "On  ne  Badine  pas  avec  1'Amour" — to  the 
extreme  profit  of  the  generation  which  was,  for  many 
years  thereafter,  to  hear  Delaunay  exquisitely  declaim 
it  at  the  Theatre  Francais;  it  is  that,  strange  to  say, 
almost  the  finest  flower  of  the  bouquet  is  the  now- 
famous  written  "declaration"  addressed  to  Pagello  one 
evening  by  the  lady.  Musset  was  ill  in  bed;  he  was  the 


208  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

attendant  doctor;  and  while,  watching  and  ignorant 
of  French,  he  twirled  his  thumbs  or  dipped  into  a  book, 
his  patient's  companion,  on  the  other  side  of  the  table 
and  with  the  lamp  between  them,  dashed  off  (it  took 
time)  a  specimen  of  her  finest  prose,  which  she  then 
folded  and  handed  to  him,  and  which,  for  perusal  more 
at  leisure,  he  carried  off  in  his  pocket.  It  proved 
neither  more  nor  less  than  one  of  the  pontoon  bridges 
which  a  force  engaged  in  an  active  campaign  holds 
itself  ready  at  any  time  to  throw  across  a  river,  and 
was  in  fact  of  its  kind  a  stout  and  beautiful  structure. 
It  happily  spanned  at  all  events  the  gulf  of  a  short 
acquaintance. 

The  incident  bears  a  family  resemblance  to  another 
which  our  biographer  finds  in  her  path  in  the  year  1837. 
Having  to  chronicle  the  close  of  the  relation  with 
Michel  de  Bourges,  from  which  again  her  heroine  had 
so  much  to  suffer,  she  has  also  to  mention  that  this 
catastrophe  was  precipitated,  to  all  appearance,  by 
the  contemporaneous  dawn  of  an  affection  "plus 
douce,  moins  enthousiaste,  moins  apre  aussi,  et  j'es- 
pere  plus  durable."  The  object  of  this  affection  was 
none  other  than  the  young  man  then  installed  at 
Nohant  as  preceptor  to  Madame  Sand's  children— 
but  as  to  whom  in  the  event  we  ask  ourselves  what  by 
this  time  her  notion  of  measure  or  durability  can  have 
become.  It  is  just  this  element  that  has  positively 
least  to  do,  we  seem  to  make  out,  with  "affection"  as 
so  practised.  Affection  in  any  sense  worth  speaking 
of  is  durability;  and  it  is  the  repeated  impermanence 
of  those  manifestations  of  it  on  behalf  of  which  the 
high  horse  of  "passion"  is  ridden  so  hard  that  makes  us 
wonder  whether  such  loves  and  such  licences,  in  spite 


GEORGE  SAND  209 

of  the  quality  of  free  experience  they  represent,  had 
really  anything  to  do  with  it.  It  was  surely  the  last 
thing  they  contained.  Felicien  Mallefille  may  be, 
to  his  heart's  content,  of  1837  and  even  of  a  portion 
of  1838;  it  is  Chopin  who  is  of  the  rest  of  the  year 
and — let  us  hope  our  biographer  will  have  occasion  to 
show  us — of  at  least  the  whole  of  the  following.  It  is 
here  that,  as  I  have  mentioned,  she  pauses. 

One  of  the  most  interesting  contributions  to  her 
subject  is  the  long  letter  from  Balzac  to  his  future 
wife,  Madame  Hanska,  now  reproduced  in  the  most 
substantial  of  the  few  volumes  of  his  correspondence 
("Lettres  a  1'fitrangere,  1833-1842,"  published  1899) 
and  printed  by  Madame  Karenine.  The  author,  find- 
ing himself  near  Nohant  in  the  spring  of  1838,  went 
over  to  pay  his  illustrious  colleague  a  visit  and  spent 
more  than  a  day  in  sustained  conversation  with  her. 
He  had  the  good  fortune  to  find  her  alone,  so  that  they 
could  endlessly  talk  and  smoke  by  the  fire,  and  nothing 
can  be  all  at  once  more  vivid,  more  curious  and  more 
judicious  than  his  immediate  report  of  the  occasion. 
It  lets  into  the  whole  question  of  his  hostess's  character 
and  relations — inevitably  more  or  less  misrepresented 
by  the  party  most  involved — air  and  light  and  truth; 
it  fixes  points  and  re-establishes  proportions.  It  shows 
appearances  confronted,  in  a  word,  with  Balzac's 
strong  sense  of  the  real  and  offers  the  grateful  critic 
still  another  chance  to  testify  for  that  precious  gift. 
This  same  critic's  mind,  it  must  be  added,  rests  with 
complacency  on  the  vision  thus  evoked,  the  way  that 
for  three  days,  from  five  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  till 
five  in  the  morning,  the  wonderful  friends  must  have 
had  things  out.  For  once,  we  feel  sure,  fundamental 


210  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

questions  were  not  shirked.  As  regards  his  comrade 
at  any  rate  Balzac  puts  his  finger  again  and  again  on 
the  truth  and  the  idiosyncrasy.  "She  is  not  aimable 
and  in  consequence  will  always  find  it  difficult  to  be 
loved."  He  adds — and  it  is  here  that  he  comes  nearest 
straightening  the  question — that  she  has  in  character 
all  the  leading  marks  of  the  man  and  as  few  as  possible 
those  of  his  counterpart.  He  implies  that,  though 
judged  as  a  woman  she  may  be  puzzling  enough,  she 
hangs  together  perfectly  if  judged  as  a  man.  She  is 
a  man,  he  repeats,  "and  all  the  more  that  she  wants 
to  be,  that  she  has  sunk  the  woman,  that  she  isn't 
one.  Women  attract,  and  she  repels;  and,  as  I  am 
much  of  a  man,  if  this  is  the  effect  she  produces  on  me 
she  must  produce  it  on  men  who  are  like  me — so  that 
she  will  always  be  unhappy."  He  qualifies  as  justly, 
I  may  parenthesise,  her  artistic  side,  the  limits  of  which, 
he  moreover  intimates,  she  had  herself  expressed  to 
him.  "She  has  neither  intensity  of  conception,  nor 
the  constructive  gift,  nor  the  faculty  of  reaching  the 
truth" — Balzac's  own  deep  dye  of  the  truth — "nor 
the  art  of  the  pathetic.  But  she  holds  that,  without 
knowing  the  French  language,  she  has  style.  And 
it's  true." 

The  light  of  mere  evidence,  the  light  of  such  re- 
searches as  Madame  Karenine's,  added  to  her  so 
copious  correspondence  and  autobiography,  makes 
Madame  Sand  so  much  of  a  riddle  that  we  grasp  at 
Balzac's  authoritative  word  as  at  an  approach  to  a 
solution.  It  is,  strange  to  say,  by  reading  another 
complexity  into  her  image  that  we  finally  simplify  it. 
The  riddle  consists  in  the  irreconcilability  of  her  dis- 
tinction and  her  vulgarity.  Vulgar  somehow  in  spite 


GEORGE  SAND  211 

of  everything  is  the  record  of  so  much  taking  and 
tasting  and  leaving,  so  much  publicity  and  palpability 
of  "heart,"  so  much  experience  reduced  only  to  the 
terms  of  so  many  more  or  less  greasy  males.  And  not 
only  vulgar  but  in  a  manner  grotesque— from  the  mo- 
ment, that  is,  that  the  experience  is  presented  to  us 
with  any  emphasis  in  the  name  of  terror  and  pity.  It 
was  not  a  passive  but  an  active  situation,  that  of  a 
nature  robust  and  not  too  fastidious,  full  at  all  times 
of  resistance  and  recovery.  No  history  gives  us  really 
more  ground  to  protest  against  the  new  fashion,  rife 
in  France,  of  transporting  "love,"  as  there  mainly 
represented,  to  the  air  of  morals  and  of  melancholy. 
The  fashion  betrays  only  the  need  to  rejuvenate,  at  a 
considerable  cost  of  falsity,  an  element  in  connection 
with  which  levity  is  felt  either  to  have  exhausted  itself 
or  to  look  thin  as  a  motive.  It  is  in  the  light  of  levity 
that  many  of  the  facts  presented  by  Madame  Karenine 
are  most  intelligible,  and  that  is  the  circumstance 
awkward  for  sensibility  and  for  all  the  graces  it  is 
invited  to  show. 

The  scene  quite  changes  when  we  cease  to  expect 
these  graces.  As  a  man  Madame  Sand  was  admirable 
—especially  as  a  man  of  the  dressing-gown  and  slip- 
pers order,  easy  of  approach  and  of  tutoiement,  rubbing 
shoulders  with  queer  company  and  not  superstitiously 
haunted  by  the  conception  of  the  gentleman.  There 
have  been  many  men  of  genius,  delightful,  prodigal 
and  even  immortal,  who  squared  but  scantly  with  that 
conception,  and  it  is  a  company  to  which  our  heroine 
is  simply  one  of  the  most  interesting  of  recruits.  She 
has  in  it  all  her  value  and  loses  none  of  her  charm. 
Above  all  she  becomes  in  a  manner  comprehensible,  as 


212  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

any  frank  Bohemian  is  comprehensible.  We  have 
only  to  imagine  the  Bohemian  really  endowed,  the 
Bohemian,  that  is,  both  industrious  and  wise,  to  get 
almost  all  her  formula.  She  keeps  here  and  there  a 
feminine  streak — has  at  moments  an  excess  of  volu- 
bility and  too  great  an  insistence  on  having  been  in 
the  right;  but  for  the  rest,  as  Balzac  says,  the  char- 
acter, confronted  with  the  position,  is  an  explanation. 
"Son  male,"  he  tells  Madame  Hanska,  "etait  rare"- 
than  which  nothing  could  have  been  more  natural. 
Yet  for  this  masculine  counterpart — so  difficult  to  find 
— she  ingenuously  spent  much  of  her  early  life  in  look- 
ing. That  the  search  was  a  mistake  is  what  consti- 
tutes, in  all  the  business  of  which  the  Musset  episode 
is  the  type,  the  only,  the  real  melancholy,  the  real 
moral  tragedy. 

For  all  such  mistakes,  none  the  less,  the  whole  les- 
son of  the  picture  is  precisely  in  the  disconcerting  suc- 
cess of  her  system.  Everything  was  at  the  start  against 
that  presumption;  but  everything  at  the  end  was  to 
indicate  that  she  was  not  to  have  been  defeated. 
Others  might  well  have  been,  and  the  banks  of  the 
stream  of  her  career  are  marked,  not  invisibly,  with 
mouldering  traces  of  the  less  lucky  or  the  less  buoyant; 
but  her  attitude  as  life  went  on  was  more  and  more 
that  of  showing  how  she  profited  of  all  things  for  wis- 
dom and  sympathy,  for  a  general  expertness  and 
nobleness.  These  forces,  all  clarified  to  an  admirable 
judgment,  kept  her  to  the  last  day  serene  and  superior, 
and  they  are  one  of  the  reasons  why  the  monument 
before  us  is  felt  not  to  be  misplaced.  There  should 
always  be  a  monument  to  those  who  have  achieved  a 
prodigy.  What  greater  prodigy  than  to  have  be- 


GEORGE  SAND  213 

queathed  in  such  mixed  elements,  to  have  principally 
made  up  of  them,  the  affirmation  of  an  unprecedented 
intensity  of  life  ?  For  though  this  intensity  was  one 
that  broke  down  in  each  proposed  exhibition  the  gen- 
eral example  remains,  incongruously,  almost  the  best 
we  can  cite.  And  all  we  can  say  is  that  this  brings 
us  back  once  more  to  the  large  manner,  the  exceptional 
energy  and  well-nigh  monstrous  vitality,  of  the  individ- 
ual concerned.  Nothing  is  so  absurd  as  a  half-dis- 
guise, and  Madame  Sand's  abiding  value  will  probably 
be  in  her  having  given  her  sex,  for  its  new  evolution 
and  transformation,  the  real  standard  and  measure  of 
change.  This  evolution  and  this  transformation  are 
all  round  us  unmistakable;  the  change  is  in  the  air; 
women  are  turned  more  and  more  to  looking  at  life  as 
men  look  at  it  and  to  getting  from  it  what  men  get. 
In  this  direction  their  aim  has  been  as  yet  compar- 
atively modest  and  their  emulation  low;  the  chal- 
lenge they  have  hitherto  picked  up  is  but  the  challenge 
of  the  "average"  male.  The  approximation  of  the 
extraordinary  woman  has  been  practically,  in  other 
words,  to  the  ordinary  man.  George  Sand's  service 
is  that  she  planted  the  flag  much  higher — her  own 
approximation  at  least  was  to  the  extraordinary.  She 
reached  him,  she  surpassed  him,  and  she  showed  how, 
with  native  dispositions,  the  thing  could  be  done.  So 
far  as  we  have  come  these  new  records  will  live  as  the 
precious  text-book  of  the  business. 


GEORGE  SAND 
1914 

IT  has  much  occurred  to  us,  touching  those  further 
liberations  of  the  subordinate  sex  which  fill  our  ears 
just  now  with  their  multitudinous  sound,  that  the  pro- 
moters of  the  great  cause  make  a  good  deal  less  than 
they  might  of  one  of  their  very  first  contentious 
"assets,"  if  it  may  not  indeed  be  looked  at  as  quite 
the  first;  and  thereby  fail  to  pass  about,  to  the  gen- 
eral elation,  a  great  vessel  of  truth.  Is  this  because 
the  life  and  example  of  George  Sand  are  things  un- 
known or  obscure  to  the  talkers  and  fighters  of  to-day 
— present  and  vivid  as  they  were  to  those  of  the  last 
mid-century,  or  because  of  some  fear  that  to  invoke 
victory  in  her  name  might,  for  particular,  for  even 
rueful  reasons,  not  be  altogether  a  safe  course  ?  It  is 
difficult  to  account  otherwise  for  the  fact  that  so 
ample  and  embossed  a  shield,  and  one  that  shines  too 
at  last  with  a  strong  and  settled  lustre,  is  rather  left 
hanging  on  the  wall  than  seen  to  cover  advances  or 
ward  ofF  attacks  in  the  fray.  Certain  it  is  that  if  a 
lapse  of  tradition  appeared  at  one  time  to  have  left 
a  little  in  the  lurch  the  figure  of  the  greatest  of  all 
women  of  letters,  of  Letters  in  truth  most  exactly,  as 
we  hold  her  surely  to  have  been,  that  explanation 
should  have  begun  to  fail,  some  fourteen  years  ago, 
with  the  publication  of  the  first  volume  of  Madame 
Wladimir  Karenine's  biography,  and  even  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  this  singularly  interesting  work  was  not 

214 


GEORGE  SAND  215 

till  a  twelvemonth  ago  to  arrive  at  the  dignity  of  a 
third,1  which  leaves  it,  for  all  its  amplitude,  still  in- 
complete. The  latest  instalment,  now  before  us,  fol- 
lows its  predecessors  after  an  interval  that  had  alarmed 
us  not  a  little  for  the  proper  consummation;  and  the 
story  is  even  now  carried  but  to  the  eve  of  the  Revolu- 
tion of  1848,  after  which  its  heroine  (that  of  the  Revo- 
lution, we  may  almost  say,  as  well  as  of  the  narrative) 
was  to  have  some  twenty-seven  years  to  live.  Madame 
Karenine  appears  to  be  a  Russian  critic  writing  under 
a  pseudonym;  portions  of  her  overbrimming  study 
have  appeared  dispersedly,  we  gather,  in  Russian 
periodicals,  but  the  harmonious  French  idiom,  of  which 
she  is  all-sufficient  mistress,  welds  them  effectively  to- 
gether, and  the  result  may  already  be  pronounced  a 
commemorative  monument  of  all  but  the  first  order. 
The  first  order  in  such  attempts  has  for  its  sign  a 
faculty  of  selection  and  synthesis,  not  to  say  a  sense  of 
composition  and  proportion,  which  neither  the  chron- 
icler nor  the  critic  in  these  too  multiplied  pages  is  able 
consistently  to  exhibit;  though  on  the  other  hand  they 
represent  quite  the  high-water  mark  of  patience  and 
persistence,  of  the  ideal  biographic  curiosity.  They 
enjoy  further  the  advantage  of  the  documented  state 
in  a  degree  that  was  scarce  to  have  been  hoped  for, 
every  source  of  information  that  had  remained  in  re- 
serve— and  these  proved  admirably  numerous — having 
been  opened  to  our  inquirer  by  the  confidence  of  the 
illustrious  lady's  two  great-granddaughters,  both  alive 
at  the  time  the  work  was  begun.  Add  to  this  that 
there  has  grown  up  in  France  a  copious  George  Sand 
literature,  a  vast  body  of  illustrative  odds  and  ends, 

1  George  Sand,  sa  Vie  et  ses  CEuvres,  vol.  iii.  (1838-1848).    Par  Wladimir 
Karenine.     Paris,  Plon,  1912. 


2i6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

relics  and  revelations,  on  which  the  would-be  prop- 
agator of  the  last  word  is  now  free  to  draw — always 
with  discrimination.  Ideally,  well-nigh  overwhelm- 
ingly informed  we  may  at  present  therefore  hold  our- 
selves; and  were  that  state  all  that  is  in  question  for 
us  nothing  could  exceed  our  advantage. 

I 

Just  the  beauty  and  the  interest  of  the  case  are, 
however,  that  such  a  condition  by  no  means  exhausts 
our  opportunity,  since  in  no  like  connection  could  it 
be  less  said  that  to  know  most  is  most  easily  or  most 
complacently  to  conclude.  May  we  not  decidedly  feel 
the  sense  and  the  "lesson,"  the  suggestive  spread,  of 
a  career  as  a  thing  scarce  really  to  be  measured  when 
the  effect  of  more  and  more  acquaintance  with  it  is 
simply  to  make  the  bounds  of  appreciation  recede  ? 
This  is  why  the  figure  now  shown  us,  blazed  upon  to 
the  last  intensity  by  the  lamplight  of  investigation, 
and  with  the  rank  oil  consumed  in  the  process  fairly 
filling  the  air,  declines  to  let  us  off  from  an  hour  of 
that  contemplation  which  yet  involves  discomfiture 
for  us  so  long  as  certain  lucidities  on  our  own  part, 
certain  serenities  of  assurance,  fail  correspondingly  to 
play  up.  We  feel  ourselves  so  outfaced,  as  it  were; 
we  somehow  want  in  any  such  case  to  meet  and  match 
the  assurances  with  which  the  subject  himself  or  her- 
self immitigably  bristles,  and  are  nevertheless  by  no 
means  certain  that  our  bringing  up  premature  forces 
or  trying  to  reply  with  lights  of  our  own  may  not  check 
the  current  of  communication,  practically  without 
sense  for  us  unless  flowing  at  its  fullest.  At  our  biog- 
rapher's rate  of  progress  we  shall  still  have  much  to 


GEORGE  SAND  217 

wait  for;  but  it  can  meanwhile  not  be  said  that  we 
have  not  plenty  to  go  on  with.  To  this  may  be  added 
that  the  stretch  of  "life,"  apart  from  the  more  con- 
crete exhibition,  already  accounted  for  by  our  three 
volumes  (if  one  may  discriminate  between  "produc- 
tion" and  life  to  a  degree  that  is  in  this  connection 
exceptionally  questionable),  represents  to  all  appear- 
ance the  most  violently  and  variously  agitated  face 
of  the  career.  The  establishment  of  the  Second 
Empire  ushered  in  for  Madame  Sand,  we  seem  in 
course  of  preparation  to  make  out,  the  long  period 
already  more  or  less  known  to  fame,  that  is  to  crit- 
icism, as  the  period  of  her  great  placidity,  her  more 
or  less  notorious  appeasement;  a  string  of  afternoon 
hours  as  hazily  golden  as  so  many  reigns  of  Antonines, 
when  her  genius  had  mastered  the  high  art  of  acting 
without  waste,  when  a  happy  play  of  inspiration  had 
all  the  air,  so  far  as  our  spectatorship  went,  of  filling 
her  large  capacity  and  her  beautiful  form  to  the  brim, 
and  when  the  gathered  fruit  of  what  she  had  daunt- 
lessly  done  and  been  heaped  itself  upon  her  table  as 
a  rich  feast  for  memory  and  philosophy.  So  she  came 
in  for  the  enjoyment  of  all  the  sagesse  her  contempo- 
raries (with  only  such  exceptions  as  M.  Paul  de  Mus- 
set  and  Madame  Louise  Colet  and  the  few  discordant 
pleaders  for  poor  Chopin)  finally  rejoiced  on  their  side 
to  acclaim;  the  sum  of  her  aspects  "composing,"  ar- 
ranging themselves  in  relation  to  each  other,  with  a 
felicity  that  nothing  could  exceed  and  that  swept  with 
great  glosses  and  justifications  every  aspect  of  the 
past.  To  few  has  it  been  given  to  "pay"  so  little, 
according  to  our  superstition  of  payment,  in  proportion 
to  such  enormities  of  ostensibly  buying  or  borrowing 
—which  fact,  we  have  to  recognise,  left  an  existence 


218  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

as  far  removed  either  from  moral,  or  intellectual,  or 
even  social  bankruptcy  as  if  it  had  proceeded  from 
the  first  but  on  the  most  saving  lines. 

That  is  what  remains  on  the  whole  most  inimitable 
in  the  picture — the  impression  it  conveys  of  an  art  of 
life  by  which  the  rough  sense  of  the  homely  adage  that 
we  may  not  both  eat  our  cake  and  have  it  was  to  be 
signally  falsified;  this  wondrous  mistress  of  the  matter 
strikes  us  so  as  having  consumed  her  refreshment,  her 
vital  supply,  to  the  last  crumb,  so  far  as  the  provision 
meant  at  least  freedom  and  ease,  and  yet  having  ever 
found  on  the  shelf  the  luxury  in  question  undiminished. 
Superlatively  interesting  the  idea  of  how  this  result 
was,  how  it  could  be,  achieved — given  the  world  as 
we  on  our  side  of  the  water  mainly  know  it;  and  it  is 
as  meeting  the  mystery  that  the  monument  before  us 
has  doubtless  most  significance.  We  shall  presently  see, 
in  the  light  of  our  renewed  occasion,  how  the  question 
is  solved;  yet  we  may  as  well  at  once  say  that  this  will 
have  had  for  its  conclusion  to  present  our  heroine — 
mainly  figuring  as  a  novelist  of  the  romantic  or  sen- 
timental order  once  pre-eminent  but  now  of  shrunken 
credit — simply  as  a  supreme  case  of  the  successful 
practice  of  life  itself.  We  have  to  distinguish  for  this 
induction  after  a  fashion  in  which  neither  Madame 
Sand  nor  her  historian  has  seemed  at  all  positively 
concerned  to  distinguish;  the  indifference  on  the  his- 
torian's part  sufficiently  indicated,  we  feel,  by  the  com- 
placency with  which,  to  be  thorough,  she  explores 
even  the  most  thankless  tracts  of  her  author's  fictional 
activity,  telling  the  tales  over  as  she  comes  to  them  on 
much  the  same  scale  on  which  she  unfolds  the  sit- 
uations otherwise  documented.  The  writer  of  "Con- 


GEORGE  SAND  219 

suelo"  and  "Claudie"  and  a  hundred  other  things  is 
to  this  view  a  literary  genius  whose  output,  as  our 
current  term  so  gracefully  has  it,  the  exercise  of  an 
inordinate  personal  energy  happens  to  mark;  whereas 
the  exercise  of  personal  energy  is  for  ourselves  what 
most  reflects  the  genius — recorded  though  this  again 
chances  here  to  be  through  the  inestimable  fact  of  the 
possession  of  style.  Of  the  action  of  that  perfect,  that 
only  real  preservative  in  face  of  other  perils  George 
Sand  is  a  wondrous  example;  but  her  letters  alone 
suffice  to  show  it,  and  the  style  of  her  letters  is  no  more 
than  the  breath  of  her  nature,  her  so  remarkable  one, 
in  which  expression  and  aspiration  were  much  the  same 
function.  That  is  what  it  is  really  to  have  style — 
when  you  set  about  performing  the  act  of  life.  The 
forms  taken  by  this  latter  impulse  then  cover  every- 
thing; they  serve  for  your  adventures  not  less  than 
they  may  serve  at  their  most  refined  pitch  for  your 
Lelias  and  your  Mauprats. 

This  means  accordingly,  we  submit,  that  those  of  us 
who  at  the  present  hour  "feel  the  change,"  as  the 
phrase  is,  in  the  computation  of  the  feminine  range, 
with  the  fullest  sense  of  what  it  may  portend,  shirk 
at  once  our  opportunity  and  our  obligation  in  not 
squeezing  for  its  last  drop  of  testimony  such  an  excep- 
tional body  of  illustration  as  we  here  possess.  It  has 
so  much  to  say  to  any  view — whether,  in  the  light  of 
old  conventions,  the  brightest  or  the  darkest — of  what 
may  either  glitter  or  gloom  in  a  conquest  of  every 
license  by  our  contemporaries  of  the  contending  sex, 
that  we  scarce  strain  a  point  in  judging  it  a  provision 
of  the  watchful  fates  for  this  particular  purpose  and 
profit:  its  answers  are  so  full  to  most  of  our  uncer- 


220  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

tainties.  It  is  to  be  noted  of  course  that  the  creator 
of  Lelia  and  of  Mauprat  was  on  the  one  hand  a  woman 
of  an  extraordinary  gift  and  on  the  other  a  woman 
resignedly  and  triumphantly  voteless — doing  without 
that  boon  so  beautifully,  for  free  development  and  the 
acquisition  and  application  of  "rights,"  that  we  seem 
to  see  her  sardonically  smile,  before  our  present  tu- 
mults, as  at  a  rumpus  about  nothing;  as  if  women 
need  set  such  preposterous  machinery  in  motion  for 
obtaining  things  which  she  had  found  it  of  the  first 
facility,  right  and  left,  to  stretch  forth  her  hand  and 
take.  There  it  is  that  her  precedent  stands  out — ap- 
parently to  a  blind  generation;  so  that  some  little 
insistence  on  the  method  of  her  appropriations  would 
seem  to  be  peculiarly  in  place.  It  was  a  method  that 
may  be  summed  up  indeed  in  a  fairly  simple,  if  compre- 
hensive, statement:  it  consisted  in  her  dealing  with 
life  exactly  as  if  she  had  been  a  man — exactly  not 
being  too  much  to  say.  Nature  certainly  had  con- 
tributed on  her  behalf  to  this  success;  it  had  given  her 
a  constitution  and  a  temperament,  the  kind  of  health, 
the  kind  of  mind,  the  kind  of  courage,  that  might  most 
directly  help — so  that  she  had  but  to  convert  these 
strong  matters  into  the  kind  of  experience.  The 
writer  of  these  lines  remembers  how  a  distinguished 
and  intimate  friend  of  her  later  years,  who  was  a  very 
great  admirer,  said  of  her  to  him  just  after  her  death 
that  her  not  having  been  born  a  man  seemed,  when 
one  knew  her,  but  an  awkward  accident:  she  had  been 
to  all  intents  and  purposes  so  fine  and  frank  a  specimen 
of  the  sex.  This  anomalous  native  turn,  it  may  be 
urged,  can  have  no  general  application — women  can- 
not be  men  by  the  mere  trying  or  by  calling  themselves 
"as  good";  they  must  have  been  provided  with  what 


GEORGE  SAND  221 

we  have  just  noted  as  the  outfit.  The  force  of  George 
Sand's  exhibition  consorts,  we  contend,  none  the  less 
perfectly  with  the  logic  of  the  consummation  awaiting 
us,  if  a  multitude  of  signs  are  to  be  trusted,  in  a  more 
or  less  near  future:  that  effective  repudiation  of  the 
distinctive,  as  to  function  and  opportunity,  as  to  work- 
ing and  playing  activity,  for  which  the  definite  re- 
moval of  immemorial  disabilities  is  but  another  name. 
We  are  in  presence  already  of  a  practical  shrinkage  of 
the  distinctive,  at  the  rapidest  rate,  and  that  it  must 
shrink  till  nothing  of  it  worth  mentioning  be  left, 
what  is  this  but  a  war-cry  (presenting  itself  also  indeed 
as  a  plea  for  peace)  with  which  our  ears  are  familiar  ? 
Unless  the  suppression  of  the  distinctive,  however,  is 
to  work  to  the  prejudice,  as  we  may  fairly  call  it,  of 
men,  drawing  them  over  to  the  feminine  type  rather 
than  drawing  women  over  to  theirs — which  is  not 
what  seems  most  probable — the  course  of  the  business 
will  be  a  virtual  undertaking  on  the  part  of  the  half  of 
humanity  acting  ostensibly  for  the  first  time  in  free- 
dom to  annex  the  male  identity,  that  of  the  other  half, 
so  far  as  may  be  at  all  contrivable,  to  its  own  cluster 
of  elements.  Individuals  are  in  great  world  and  race 
movements  negligible,  and  if  that  undertaking  must 
inevitably  appeal  to  different  recruits  with  a  differing 
cogency,  its  really  enlisting  its  army  or  becoming  re- 
flected, to  a  perfectly  conceivable  vividness,  in  the 
mass,  is  all  our  demonstration  requires.  At  that 
point  begins  the  revolution,  the  shift  of  the  emphasis 
from  the  idea  of  woman's  weakness  to  the  idea  of  her 
strength — which  is  where  the  emphasis  has  lain,  from 
far  back,  by  his  every  tradition,  on  behalf  of  man; 
and  George  Sand's  great  value,  as  we  say,  is  that  she 
gives  us  the  vision,  gives  us  the  particular  case,  of  the 


222  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

shift   achieved,   displayed  with   every   assurance   and 
working  with  every  success. 

The  answer  of  her  life  to  the  question  of  what  an 
effective  annexation  of  the  male  identity  may  amount 
to,  amount  to  in  favouring  conditions  certainly,  but 
in  conditions  susceptible  to  the  highest  degree  of  en- 
couragement and  cultivation,  leaves  nothing  to  be 
desired  for  completeness.  This  is  the  moral  of  her 
tale,  the  beauty  of  what  she  does  for  us — that  at  no 
point  whatever  of  her  history  or  her  character  do  their 
power  thus  to  give  satisfaction  break  down;  so  that 
what  we  in  fact  on  the  whole  most  recognise  is  not  the 
extension  she  gives  to  the  feminine  nature,  but  the 
richness  that  she  adds  to  the  masculine.  It  is  not 
simply  that  she  could  don  a  disguise  that  gaped  at 
the  seams,  that  she  could  figure  as  a  man  of  the  mere 
carnival  or  pantomime  variety,  but  that  she  made  so 
virile,  so  efficient  and  homogeneous  a  one.  Admir- 
able child  of  the  old  order  as  we  find  her,  she  was  far 
from  our  late-coming  theories  and  fevers — by  the 
reason  simply  of  her  not  being  reduced  to  them;  as 
to  which  nothing  about  her  is  more  eloquent  than  her 
living  at  such  ease  with  a  conception  of  the  main  rel- 
evance of  women  that  is  viewed  among  ourselves  as 
antiquated  to  "quaintness."  She  could  afford  the 
traditional  and  sentimental,  the  old  romantic  and  his- 
toric theory  of  the  function  most  natural  to  them, 
since  she  entertained  it  exactly  as  a  man  would.  It  is 
not  that  she  fails  again  and  again  to  represent  her 
heroines  as  doing  the  most  unconventional  things— 
upon  these  they  freely  embark;  but  they  never  in  the 
least  do  them  for  themselves,  themselves  as  the  "sex," 
they  do  them  altogether  for  men.  Nothing  could  well 


GEORGE  SAND  223 

be  more  interesting  thus  than  the  extraordinary  union 
of  the  pair  of  opposites  in  her  philosophy  of  the  rela- 
tion of  the  sexes — than  the  manner  in  which  her  im- 
mense imagination,  the  imagination  of  a  man  for  range 
and  abundance,  intervened  in  the  whole  matter  for 
the  benefit,  absolutely,  of  the  so-called  stronger  party, 
or  to  liberate  her  sisters  up  to  the  point  at  which  men 
may  most  gain  and  least  lose  by  the  liberation.  She 
read  the  relation  essentially  in  the  plural  term — the 
relations,  and  her  last  word  about  these  was  as  far  as 
possible  from  being  that  they  are  of  minor  importance 
to  women.  Nothing  in  her  view  could  exceed  their 
importance  to  women — it  left  every  other  far  behind  it; 
and  nothing  that  could  make  for  authority  in  her,  no 
pitch  of  tone,  no  range  of  personal  inquiry  nor  wealth 
of  experience,  no  acquaintance  with  the  question  that 
might  derive  light  from  free  and  repeated  adventure, 
but  belonged  to  the  business  of  driving  this  argument 
home. 

II 

Madame  Karenine's  third  volume  is  copiously  de- 
voted to  the  period  of  her  heroine's  intimacy  with 
Chopin  and  to  the  events  surrounding  this  agitated 
friendship,  which  largely  fill  the  ten  years  precedent 
to  '48.  Our  author  is  on  all  this  ground  overwhelmingly 
documented,  and  enlisted  though  she  is  in  the  service 
of  the  more  successful  party  to  the  association — in  the 
sense  of  Madame  Sand's  having  heartily  outlived  and 
survived,  not  to  say  professionally  and  brilliantly 
"used,"  it — the  great  composer's  side  of  the  story 
receives  her  conscientious  attention.  Curious  and 
interesting  in  many  ways,  these  reflections  of  George 
Sand's  middle  life  afford  above  all  the  most  pointed 


224  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

illustration  of  the  turn  of  her  personal  genius,  her 
aptitude  for  dealing  with  men,  in  the  intimate  rela- 
tion, exactly  after  the  fashion  in  which  numberless 
celebrated  men  have  contributed  to  their  reputation, 
not  to  say  crowned  their  claim  to  superiority,  by  deal- 
ing with  women.  This  being  above  all  the  note  of  her 
career,  with  its  vivid  show  of  what  such  dealing  could 
mean  for  play  of  mind,  for  quickening  of  gift,  for  gen- 
eral experience  and,  as  we  say,  intellectual  develop- 
ment, for  determination  of  philosophic  bent  and 
education  of  character  and  fertilisation  of  fancy,  we 
seem  to  catch  the  whole  process  in  the  fact,  under  the 
light  here  supplied  us,  as  we  catch  it  nowhere  else. 
It  gives  us  in  this  application  endlessly  much  to  con- 
sider— it  is  in  itself  so  replete  and  rounded  a  show; 
we  at  once  recognise  moreover  how  comparatively 
little  it  matters  that  such  works  as  "Lucrezia  Flo- 
riani"  and  "Un  Hiver  a  Majorque"  should  have  pro- 
ceeded from  it,  cast  into  the  shade  as  these  are,  on 
our  biographer's  evidence,  by  a  picture  of  concom- 
itant energies  still  more  attaching.  It  is  not  here  by 
the  force  of  her  gift  for  rich  improvisation,  beautiful 
as  this  was,  that  the  extraordinary  woman  holds  us, 
but  by  the  force  of  her  ability  to  act  herself  out,  given 
the  astounding  quantities  concerned  in  this  self. 
That  energy  too,  we  feel,  was  in  a  manner  an  improv- 
isation— so  closely  allied  somehow  are  both  the  cur- 
rents, the  flow  of  literary  composition  admirably  in- 
stinctive and  free,  and  the  handling  power,  as  we  are 
constantly  moved  to  call  it,  the  flow  of  a  splendid 
intelligence  all  the  while  at  its  fullest  expressional  ease, 
for  the  actual  situations  created  by  her,  for  whatever 
it  might  be  that  vitally  confronted  her.  Of  how  to 
bring  about,  or  at  the  least  find  one's  self  "in  for,"  an 


GEORGE  SAND  225 

inordinate  number  of  situations,  most  of  them  of  the 
last  difficulty,  and  then  deal  with  them  on  the  spot, 
in  the  narrowest  quarters  as  it  were,  with  an  eloquence 
and  a  plausibility  that  does  them  and  one's  own  na- 
ture at  once  a  sort  of  ideal  justice,  the  demonstration 
here  is  the  fullest — as  of  what  it  was  further  to  have  her 
unfailing  verbal  as  well  as  her  unfailing  moral  inspira- 
tion. What  predicament  could  have  been  more  of 
an  hourly  strain  for  instance,  as  we  cannot  but  sup- 
pose, than  her  finding  herself  inevitably  accompanied 
by  her  two  children  during  the  stay  at  Majorca  made 
by  Chopin  in  '38  under  her  protection  ?  The  victory 
of  assurance  and  of  the  handling  power  strikes  us  as 
none  the  less  never  an  instant  in  doubt,  that  being 
essentially  but  over  the  general  kind  of  inconvenience 
or  embarrassment  involved  for  a  mother  and  a  friend 
in  any  real  consistency  of  attempt  to  carry  things  off 
male  fashion.  We  do  not,  it  is  true,  see  a  man  as  a 
mother,  any  more  than  we  easily  see  a  woman  as  a 
gentleman — and  least  of  all  perhaps  in  either  case  as 
an  awkwardly  placed  one;  but  we  see  Madame  Sand 
as  a  sufficiently  bustling,  though  rather  a  rough  and 
ready,  father,  a  father  accepting  his  charge  and  doing 
the  best  possible  under  the  circumstances;  the  truth 
being  of  course  that  the  circumstances  never  can  be, 
even  at  the  worst,  or  still  at  the  best,  the  best  for 
parental  fondness,  so  awkward  for  him  as  for  a  mother. 

What  call,  again,  upon  every  sort  of  presence  of 
mind  could  have  been  livelier  than  the  one  made  by 
the  conditions  attending  and  following  the  marriage 
of  young  Solange  Dudevant  to  the  sculptor  Clesinger 
in  1846,  when  our  heroine,  summoned  by  the  stress  of 
events  both  to  take  responsible  action  and  to  rise  to 


226  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

synthetic  expression,  in  a  situation,  that  is  in  presence 
of  a  series  of  demonstrations  on  her  daughter's  part, 
that  we  seem  to  find  imaginable  for  a  perfect  dramatic 
adequacy  only  in  that  particular  home  circle,  fairly 
surpassed  herself  by  her  capacity  to  "meet"  every- 
thing, meet  it  much  incommoded,  yet  undismayed, 
unabashed  and  unconfuted,  and  have  on  it  all,  to  her 
great  advantage,  the  always  prodigious  last  word  ? 
The  elements  of  this  especial  crisis  claim  the  more 
attention  through  its  having  been,  as  a  test  of  her 
powers,  decidedly  the  most  acute  that  she  was  in  her 
whole  course  of  life  to  have  traversed,  more  acute 
even,  because  more  complicated,  than  the  great  oc- 
casion of  her  rupture  with  Alfred  de  Musset,  at  Venice 
in  '35,  on  which  such  a  wealth  of  contemplation  and 
of  ink  has  been  expended.  Dramatic  enough  in  their 
relation  to  each  other  certainly  those  immortal  cir- 
cumstances, immortal  so  far  as  immortalised  on  either 
side  by  genius  and  passion:  Musset's  return,  ravaged 
and  alone,  to  Paris;  his  companion's  transfer  of  her 
favour  to  Pietro  Pagello,  whom  she  had  called  in  to 
attend  her  friend  medically  in  illness  and  whose  inter- 
vention, so  far  from  simplifying  the  juncture,  com- 
plicated it  in  a  fashion  probably  scarce  paralleled  in 
the  history  of  the  erotic  relation;  her  retention  of 
Pagello  under  her  protection  for  the  rest  of  her  period 
in  Venice;  her  marvellously  domesticated  state,  in 
view  of  the  literary  baggage,  the  collection  of  social 
standards,  even  taking  these  but  at  what  they  were, 
and  the  general  amplitude  of  personality,  that  she 
brought  into  residence  with  her;  the  conveyance  of 
Pagello  to  Paris,  on  her  own  return,  and  the  apparent 
signification  to  him  at  the  very  gate  that  her  counte- 
nance was  then  and  there  withdrawn.  This  was  a 


GEORGE  SAND  227 

brilliant  case  for  her — of  coming  off  with  flying  colours; 
but  it  strikes  us  as  a  mere  preliminary  flourish  of  the 
bow  or  rough  practice  of  scales  compared  to  the  high 
virtuosity  which  Madame  Karenine's  new  material  in 
respect  to  the  latter  imbroglio  now  enables  us  ever  so 
gratefully  to  estimate.  The  protagonist's  young  chil- 
dren were  in  the  Venetian  crisis  quite  off  the  scene,  and 
on  occasions  subsequent  to  the  one  we  now  glance  at 
were  old  enough  and,  as  we  seem  free  to  call  it,  initiated 
enough  not  to  solicit  our  particular  concern  for  them; 
whereas  at  the  climax  of  the  connection  with  Chopin 
they  were  of  the  perfect  age  (which  was  the  fresh 
marriageable  in  the  case  of  Solange)  to  engage  our  best 
anxiety,  let  alone  their  being  of  a  salience  of  sensibility 
and  temper  to  leave  no  one  of  their  aspects  negligible. 
That  their  parent  should  not  have  found  herself  con- 
clusively "upset,"  sickened  beyond  repair,  or  other- 
wise morally  bankrupt,  on  her  having  to  recognise  in 
her  daughter's  hideous  perversity  and  depravity,  as 
we  learn  these  things  to  have  been,  certain  inevita- 
bilities of  consequence  from  the  social  air  of  the  ma- 
ternal circle,  is  really  a  monumental  fact  in  respect  to 
our  great  woman's  elasticity,  her  instinct  for  never 
abdicating  by  mere  discouragement.  Here  in  especial 
we  get  the  broad  male  note — it  being  so  exactly  the 
manly  part,  and  so  very  questionably  the  womanly, 
not  to  have  to  draw  from  such  imputations  of  respon- 
sibility too  crushing  a  self-consciousness.  Of  the 
extent  and  variety  of  danger  to  which  the  enjoyment 
of  a  moral  tone  could  be  exposed  and  yet  superbly  sur- 
vive Madame  Karenine's  pages  give  us  the  measure; 
they  offer  us  in  action  the  very  ideal  of  an  exemplary 
triumph  of  character  and  mind  over  one  of  the  very 
highest  tides  of  private  embarrassment  that  it  is  well 


228  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

possible  to  conceive.  And  it  is  no  case  of  that  passive 
acceptance  of  deplorable  matters  which  has  abounded 
in  the  history  of  women,  even  distinguished  ones, 
whether  to  the  pathetic  or  to  the  merely  scandalous 
effect;  the  acceptance  is  active,  constructive,  almost 
exhilarated  by  the  resources  of  affirmation  and  argu- 
ment that  it  has  at  its  command.  The  whole  instance 
is  sublime  in  its  sort,  thanks  to  the  acuteness  of  all 
its  illustrative  sides,  the  intense  interest  of  which  loses 
nothing  in  the  hands  of  our  chronicler;  who  perhaps, 
however,  reaches  off  into  the  vast  vague  of  Chopin's 
native  affiliations  and  references  with  an  energy  with 
which  we  find  it  a  little  difficult  to  keep  step. 

In  speaking  as  we  have  done  of  George  Sand's  "use" 
of  each  twist  of  her  road  as  it  came — a  use  which  we 
now  recognise  as  the  very  thriftiest — we  touch  on  that 
principle  of  vital  health  in  her  which  made  nothing 
that  might  by  the  common  measure  have  been  called 
one  of  the  graver  dilemmas,  that  is  one  of  the  checks 
to  the  continuity  of  life,  really  matter.  What  this 
felicity  most  comes  to  in  fact  is  that  doing  at  any  cost 
the  work  that  lies  to  one's  hand  shines  out  again  and 
yet  again  as  the  saving  secret  of  the  soul.  She  af- 
firmed her  freedom  right  and  left,  but  her  most  char- 
acteristic assertion  of  it  throughout  was  just  in  the 
luxury  of  labour.  The  exhaustive  account  we  at  any 
rate  now  enjoy  of  the  family  life  surrounding  her  dur- 
ing the  years  here  treated  of  and  as  she  had  consti- 
tuted it,  the  picture  of  all  the  queer  conflicting  sensi- 
bilities engaged,  and  of  the  endless  ramifications  and 
reflections  provided  for  these,  leaves  us  nothing  to 
learn  on  that  congested  air,  that  obstructive  medium 
for  the  range  of  the  higher  tone,  which  the  lady  of 


GEORGE  SAND  229 

Nohant  was  so  at  her  "objective"  happiest,  even  if 
at  her  superficially,  that  is  her  nervously,  most  flurried 
and  depressed,  in  bravely  breasting.  It  is  as  if  the 
conditions  there  and  in  Paris  during  these  several  years 
had  been  consistently  appointed  by  fate  to  throw  into 
relief  the  applications  of  a  huge  facility,  a  sort  of 
universal  readiness,  with  a  rare  intelligence  to  back  it. 
Absolutely  nothing  was  absent,  or  with  all  the  data 
could  have  been,  that  might  have  bewildered  a  weaker 
genius  into  some  lapse  of  eloquence  or  of  industry; 
everything  that  might  have  overwhelmed,  or  at  least 
have  disconcerted,  the  worker  who  could  throw  off"  the 
splendid  "Lucrezia  Floriani"  in  the  thick  of  battle 
came  upon  her  at  once,  inspiring  her  to  show  that  on 
her  system  of  health  and  cheer,  of  experiential  economy, 
as  we  may  call  it,  to  be  disconcerted  was  to  be  lost. 
To  be  lacerated  and  calumniated  was  in  comparison 
a  trifle;  with  a  certain  sanity  of  reaction  these  things 
became  as  naught,  for  the  sanity  of  reaction  was  but 
the  line  of  consistency,  the  theory  and  attitude  of 
sincerity  kept  at  the  highest  point.  The  artist  in 
general,  we  need  scarcely  remind  ourselves,  is  in  a 
high  degree  liable  to  arrive  at  the  sense  of  what  he  may 
have  seen  or  felt,  or  said  or  suffered,  by  working  it  out 
as  a  subject,  casting  it  into  some  form  prescribed  by  his 
art;  but  even  here  he  in  general  knows  limits — unless 
perchance  he  be  loose  as  Byron  was  loose,  or  possess 
such  a  power  of  disconnection,  such  a  clear  stand-off"  of 
the  intelligence,  as  accompanied  the  experiments  of 
Goethe.  Our  own  experiments,  we  commonly  feel,  are 
comparatively  timid,  just  as  we  can  scarce  be  said,  in 
the  homely  phrase,  to  serve  our  esthetic  results  of  them 
hot  and  hot;  we  are  too  conscious  of  a  restrictive  in- 
stinct about  the  conditions  we  may,  in  like  familiar 


23o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

language  let  ourselves  in  for,  there  being  always  the 
question  of  what  we  should  be  able  "intellectually"  to 
show  for  them.  The  life  of  the  author  of  "Lucrezia 
Floriani"  at  its  most  active  may  fairly  be  described 
as  an  immunity  from  restrictive  instincts  more  ably 
cultivated  than  any  we  know.  Again  and  yet  again 
we  note  the  positive  premium  so  put  upon  the  sur- 
render to  sensibility,  and  how,  since  the  latter  was 
certain  to  spread  to  its  maximum  and  to  be  admired 
in  proportion  to  its  spread,  some  surrender  was  always 
to  have  been  worth  while.  "Lucrezia  Floriani"  ought 
to  have  been  rather  measurably  bad — lucidity,  har- 
mony, maturity,  definiteness  of  sense,  being  so  likely 
to  fail  it  in  the  troubled  air  in  which  it  was  born. 
Yet  how  can  we  do  less  than  applaud  a  composition 
throwing  off  as  it  goes  such  a  passage  as  the  splendid 
group  of  pages  cited  by  Madame  Karenine  from  the 
incident  of  the  heroine's  causing  herself  to  be  rowed 
over  to  the  island  in  her  Italian  lake  on  that  summer 
afternoon  when  the  sense  of  her  situation  had  become 
sharp  for  her  to  anguish,  in  order  to  take  stock  of  the 
same  without  interruption  and  see,  as  we  should  say 
to-day,  where  she  is  ?  The  whole  thing  has  the  grand 
manner  and  the  noblest  eloquence,  reaching  out  as 
it  does  on  the  spot  to  the  lesson  and  the  moral  of  the 
convulsions  that  have  been  prepared  in  the  first  in- 
stance with  such  complacency,  and  illustrating  in  per- 
fection the  author's  faculty  for  the  clear  re-emergence 
and  the  prompt  or,  as  we  may  call  it,  the  paying  re- 
action. The  case  is  put  for  her  here  as  into  its  final 
nutshell:  you  may  "live"  exactly  as  you  like,  that  is 
live  in  perfect  security  and  fertility,  when  such  breadth 
of  rendering  awaits  your  simply  sitting  down  to  it.  Is 
it  not  true,  we  say,  that  without  her  breadth  our  won- 


GEORGE  SAND  231 

derful  woman  would  have  been  "nowhere"  ? — whereas 
with  it  she  is  effectively  and  indestructibly  at  any 
point  of  her  field  where  she  may  care  to  pretend  to 
stand. 

This  biographer,  I  must  of  course  note,  discriminates 
with  delicacy  among  her  heroine's  felicities  and  mis- 
takes, recognising  that  some  of  the  former,  as  a  latent 
awkwardness  in  them  developed,  inevitably  parted 
with  the  signs  that  distinguished  them  from  the  latter; 
but  I  think  we  feel,  as  the  instances  multiply,  that  no 
regret  could  have  equalled  for  us  that  of  our  not  having 
the  display  vivid  and  complete.  Once  all  the  elements 
of  the  scarce  in  advance  imaginable  were  there  it 
would  have  been  a  pity  that  they  should  not  offer  us 
the  show  of  their  full  fruition.  What  more  striking 
show,  for  example,  than  that,  as  recorded  by  Madame 
Karenine  in  a  footnote,  the  afflicted  parent  of  Solange 
should  have  lived  to  reproduce,  or  rather,  as  she  would 
herself  have  said,  to  "arrange"  the  girlish  character 
and  conduct  of  that  young  person,  so  humiliating  at  the 
time  to  any  near  relation,  let  alone  a  mother,  in  the 
novel  of  "Mademoiselle  Merquem,"  where  the  truth 
to  the  original  facts  and  the  emulation  of  the  grace- 
less prime  "effects"  are  such  as  our  author  can  vouch 
for  ?  The  fiction  we  name  followed  indeed  after  long 
years,  but  during  the  lifetime  of  the  displeasing  daugh- 
ter and  with  an  ease  of  reference  to  the  past  that  may 
fairly  strike  us  as  the  last  word  of  superiority  to  blight- 
ing association.  It  is  quite  as  if  the  close  and  amused 
matching  of  the  character  and  its  play  in  the  novel 
with  the  wretched  old  realities,  those  that  had  broken 
in  their  day  upon  the  scared  maternal  vision,  had  been 
a  work  of  ingenuity  attended  with  no  pang.  The 


232  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

example  is  interesting  as  a  measure  of  the  possible 
victory  of  time  in  a  case  where  we  might  have  sup- 
posed the  one  escape  to  have  been  by  forgetting. 
Madame  Sand  remembers  to  the  point  of  gratefully — 
gratefully  as  an  artist — reconstituting;  we  in  fact  feel 
her,  as  the  irrepressible,  the  "healthy"  artist,  positively 
to  enjoy  so  doing.  Thus  it  clearly  defined  itself  for 
her  in  the  fulness  of  time  that,  humiliating,  to  use  our 
expression,  as  the  dreadful  Solange  might  have  been 
and  have  incessantly  remained,  she  herself  had  never 
in  the  least  consented  to  the  stupidity  or  sterility  of 
humiliation.  So  it  could  be  that  the  free  mind  and  the 
free  hand  were  ever  at  her  service.  A  beautiful  in- 
different agility,  a  power  to  cast  out  that  was  at  least 
proportioned  to  the  power  to  take  in,  hangs  about  all 
this  and  meets  us  in  twenty  connections.  Who  of  her 
readers  has  forgotten  the  harmonious  dedication — 
her  inveterate  dedications  have  always,  like  her  clear 
light  prefaces,  the  last  grace — of  "Jeanne,"  so  anciently, 
so  romantically  readable,  to  her  faithful  Berrichon 
servant  who  sits  spinning  by  the  fire  ?  "Vous  ne  savez 
pas  lire,  ma  paisible  amie,"  but  that  was  not  to  prevent 
the  association  of  her  name  with  the  book,  since  both 
her  own  daughter  and  the  author's  are  in  happy  pos- 
session of  the  art  and  will  be  able  to  pass  the  enter- 
tainment on  to  her.  This  in  itself  is  no  more  than  a 
sign  of  the  writer's  fine  democratic  ease,  which  she 
carried  at  all  times  to  all  lengths,  and  of  her  charming 
habit  of  speech;  but  it  somehow  becomes  further  illus- 
trational,  testifying  for  the  manner  in  which  genius, 
if  it  be  but  great  enough,  lives  its  life  at  small  cost, 
when  we  learn  that  after  all,  by  a  turn  of  the  hand, 
the  "paisible  amie"  was,  under  provocation,  bundled 
out  of  the  house  as  if  the  beautiful  relation  had  not 


GEORGE  SAND  233 

meant  half  of  what  appeared.  Franfoise  and  her 
presence  were  dispensed  with,  but  the  exquisite  lines 
remain,  which  we  would  not  be  without  for  the  world. 


Ill 

The  various  situations  determined  for  the  more  emi- 
nent of  George  Sand's  intimate  associates  would  always 
be  independently  interesting,  thanks  to  the  intrinsic 
appeal  of  these  characters  and  even  without  the  light 
reflected  withal  on  the  great  agent  herself;  which  is 
why  poor  Chopin's  figuration  in  the  events  of  the  year 
1847,  as  Madame  Karenine  so  fully  reconstitutes 
them,  is  all  that  is  wanted  to  point  their  almost  night- 
mare quality.  Without  something  of  a  close  view  of 
them  we  fail  of  a  grasp  of  our  heroine's  genius — her 
genius  for  keeping  her  head  in  deep  seas  morally  and 
reflectively  above  water,  though  but  a  glance  at  them 
must  suffice  us  for  averting  this  loss.  The  old-world 
quality  of  drama,  which  throughout  so  thickens  and 
tones  the  air  around  her,  finds  remarkable  expression 
in  the  whole  picture  of  the  moment.  Every  connection 
involved  bristles  like  a  conscious  consequence,  tells  for 
all  it  is  worth,  as  we  say,  and  the  sinister  complexity 
of  reference — for  all  the  golden  clearings-up  that  awaited 
it  on  the  ideal  plane — leaves  nothing  to  be  desired. 
The  great  and  odd  sign  of  the  complications  and  con- 
vulsions, the  alarms  and  excursions  recorded,  is  that 
these  are  all  the  more  or  less  direct  fruits  of  sensibil- 
ity, which  had  primarily  been  indulged  in,  under  the 
doom  of  a  preparation  of  them  which  no  preparation 
of  anything  else  was  to  emulate,  with  a  good  faith 
fairly  touching  in  presence  of  the  eventual  ugliness. 
Madame  Sand's  wonderful  mother,  commemorated 


234  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

for  us  in  "L'Histoire  de  ma  Vie"  with  the  truth  surely 
attaching  in  a  like  degree  to  no  mother  in  all  the 
literature  of  so-called  confession,  had  had  for  cousin 
a  "fille  entretenue"  who  had  married  a  mechanic. 
This  Adele  Brault  had  had  in  the  course  of  her  adven- 
tures a  daughter  in  whom,  as  an  unfortunate  young 
relative,  Madame  Dupin  had  taken  an  interest,  intro- 
ducing her  to  the  heiress  of  Nohant,  who  viewed  her 
with  favour — she  appears  to  have  been  amiable  and 
commendable — and  eventually  associated  her  with  her 
own  children.  She  was  thus  the  third  member  of  that 
illegitimate  progeny  with  which  the  Nohant  scene  was 
to  have  become  familiar,  George  Sand's  natural  brother 
on  her  father's  side  and  her  natural  sister  on  her 
mother's  representing  this  element  from  the  earlier 
time  on.  The  young  Augustine,  fugitive  from  a  circle 
still  less  edifying,  was  thus  made  a  companion  of  the  son 
and  the  daughter  of  the  house,  and  was  especially  held 
to  compare  with  the  latter  to  her  great  advantage  in 
the  matter  of  character,  docility  and  temper.  These 
young  persons  formed,  as  it  were,  with  his  more  dis- 
tinguished friend,  the  virtual  family  of  Chopin  during 
those  years  of  specifically  qualified  domestication  which 
affect  us  as  only  less  of  a  mystification  to  taste  than 
that  phase  of  the  unrestricted  which  had  immediately 
preceded  them.  Hence  a  tangled  tissue  of  relations 
within  the  circle  that  became,  as  it  strikes  us,  inde- 
scribable for  difficulty  and  "delicacy,"  not  to  say  for 
the  perfection  of  their  impracticability,  and  as  to 
which  the  great  point  is  that  Madame  Sand's  having 
taken  them  so  robustly  for  granted  throws  upon  her 
temperamental  genius  a  more  direct  light  than  any 
other.  The  whole  case  belongs  doubtless  even  more 
to  the  hapless  history  of  Chopin  himself  than  to  that 


GEORGE  SAND  235 

of  his  terrible  friend — terrible  for  her  power  to  flourish 
in  conditions  sooner  or  later  fatal  to  weaker  vessels; 
but  is  in  addition  to  this  one  of  the  most  striking  il- 
lustrations possible  of  that  view  or  theory  of  social  life 
handed  over  to  the  reactions  of  sensibility  almost  alone 
which,  while  ever  so  little  the  ideal  of  the  Anglo-Saxon 
world,  has  largely  governed  the  manners  of  its  sister 
societies.  It  has  been  our  view,  very  emphatically, 
in  general,  that  the  sane  and  active  social  body — or, 
for  that  matter,  the  sane  and  active  individual,  ad- 
dressed to  the  natural  business  of  life — goes  wrongly 
about  it  to  encourage  sensibility,  or  to  do  anything  on 
the  whole  but  treat  it  as  of  no  prime  importance;  the 
traps  it  may  lay  for  us,  however,  being  really  of  the 
fewest  in  a  race  to  which  the  very  imagination  of  it 
may  be  said,  I  think,  to  have  been  comparatively 
denied.  The  imagination  of  it  sat  irremovably,  on  the 
other  hand,  and  as  a  matter  of  course,  at  the  Nohant 
fireside;  where  indeed  we  find  the  play  and  the 
ravage  chiefly  interesting  through  our  thus  seeing  the 
delicate  Chopin,  whose  semi-smothered  appeal  remains 
peculiarly  pathetic,  all  helpless  and  foredoomed  at  the 
centre  of  the  whirl.  Nothing  again  strikes  us  more 
in  the  connection  than  the  familiar  truth  that  interest- 
ing persons  make  everything  that  concerns  them  in- 
teresting, or  seldom  fail  to  redeem  from  what  might  in 
another  air  seem  but  meanness  and  vanity  even  their 
most  compromised  states  and  their  greatest  wastes  of 
value.  Every  one  in  the  particular  Nohant  drama 
here  exposed  loses  by  the  exposure — so  far  as  loss  could 
be  predicated  of  amounts  which,  in  general,  excepting 
the  said  sensibility,  were  so  scant  among  them;  every 
one,  that  is,  save  the  ruling  spirit  of  all,  with  the  ex- 
traordinary mark  in  her  of  the  practical  defiance  of 


236  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

waste  and  of  her  inevitable  enrichment,  for  our  mea- 
sure, as  by  reflection  from  the  surrounding  shrinkage. 
One  of  the  oddest  aspects  of  the  scene  is  also  one  of 
the  wretchedest,  but  the  oddity  makes  it  interesting, 
by  the  law  I  just  glanced  at,  in  spite  of  its  vulgar  side. 
How  could  it  not  be  interesting,  we  ask  as  we  read, 
to  feel  that  Chopin,  though  far  from  the  one  man,  was 
the  one  gentleman  of  the  association,  the  finest  set  of 
nerves  and  scruples,  and  yet  to  see  how  little  that 
availed  him,  in  exasperated  reactions,  against  mistakes 
of  perverted  sympathy  ?  It  is  relevant  in  a  high  degree 
to  our  view  of  his  great  protectress  as  reducible  at  her 
best  to  male  terms  that  she  herself  in  this  very  light 
fell  short,  missed  the  ideal  safeguard  which  for  her 
friend  had  been  preinvolved — as  of  course  may  be  the 
peril,  ever,  with  the  creature  so  transmuted,  and  as  is 
so  strikingly  exemplified,  in  the  pages  before  us,  when 
Madame  Karenine  ingenuously  gives  us  chapter  and 
verse  for  her  heroine's  so  unqualified  demolition  of 
the  person  of  Madame  d'Agoult,  devotee  of  Liszt, 
mother  to  be,  by  that  token,  of  Richard  Wagner's 
second  wife,  and  sometime  intimate  of  the  author 
of  "Isidora,"  in  which  fiction  we  are  shown  the  parody 
perpetrated.  If  women  rend  each  other  on  occasion 
with  sharper  talons  than  seem  to  belong  on  the  whole 
to  the  male  hand,  however  intendingly  applied,  we 
find  ourselves  reflect  parenthetically  that  the  loss  of 
this  advantage  may  well  be  a  matter  for  them  to  con- 
sider when  the  new  approximation  is  the  issue. 

The  great  sign  of  the  Nohant  circle  on  all  this  show- 
ing, at  any  rate,  is  the  intense  personalism,  as  we  may 
call  it,  reigning  there,  or  in  other  words  the  vivacity, 
the  acuity  and  irritability  of  the  personal  relations — • 


GEORGE  SAND  237 

which  flourished  so  largely,  we  at  the  same  time  feel, 
by  reason  of  the  general  gift  for  expression,  that  gift 
to  which  we  owe  the  general  superiority  of  every  letter, 
from  it  scarce  matters  whom,  laid  under  contribution 
by  our  author.  How  could  people  not  feel  with  acuity 
when  they  could,  when  they  had  to,  write  with  such 
point  and  such  specific  intelligence  ? — just  indeed  as 
one  asks  how  letters  could  fail  to  remain  at  such  a  level 
among  them  when  they  incessantly  generated  choice 
matter  for  expression.  Madame  Sand  herself  is  of 
course  on  this  ground  easily  the  most  admirable,  as 
we  have  seen;  but  every  one  "knows  how"  to  write, 
and  does  it  well  in  proportion  as  the  matter  in  hand 
most  demands  and  most  rewards  proper  saying.  Much 
of  all  this  stuff  of  history  seems  indeed  to  have  been 
susceptible  of  any  amount  of  force  of  statement;  yet 
we  note  all  the  while  how  in  the  case  of  the  great 
mistress  of  the  pen  at  least  some  shade  of  intrinsic 
beauty  attends  even  the  presentation  of  quite  abomi- 
nable facts.  We  can  only  see  it  as  abominable,  at  least, 
so  long  as  we  have  Madame  Sand's  words — which  are 
somehow  a  different  thing  from  her  word — for  it,  that 
Chopin  had  from  the  first  "sided"  with  the  atrocious 
Solange  in  that  play  of  her  genius  which  is  character- 
ised by  our  chronicler  as  wickedness  for  the  sake  of 
wickedness,  as  art  for  the  sake  of  art,  without  other 
logic  or  other  cause.  "Once  married,"  says  Madame 
Karenine,  "she  made  a  double  use  of  this  wickedness. 
She  had  always  hated  Augustine;  she  wished,  one 
doesn't  know  why,  to  break  off  her  marriage,  and  by 
calumnies  and  insinuations  she  succeeded.  Then 
angry  with  her  mother  she  avenged  herself  on  her  as 
well  by  further  calumnies.  Thereupon  took  place  at 
Nohant  such  events  that" — that  in  fine  we  stop  before 


238  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

them  with  this  preliminary  shudder.  The  cross- 
currents of  violence  among  them  would  take  more 
keeping  apart  than  we  have  time  for,  the  more  that 
everything  comes  back,  for  interest,  to  the  intrinsic 
weight  of  the  tone  of  the  principal  sufferer  from  them — 
as  we  see  her,  as  we  wouldn't  for  the  world  not  see  her, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  Chopin  was  to  succumb  scarce 
more  than  a  year  later  to  multiplied  lacerations,  and 
that  she  was  to  override  and  reproduce  and  pre-ap- 
pointedly  flourish  for  long  years  after.  If  it  is  inter- 
esting, as  I  have  pronounced  it,  that  Chopin,  again, 
should  have  consented  to  be  of  the  opinion  of  Solange 
that  the  relations  between  her  brother  Maurice  and 
the  hapless  Augustine  were  of  the  last  impropriety,  I 
fear  I  can  account  no  better  for  this  than  by  our  sense 
that  the  more  the  genius  loci  has  to  feed  her  full  tone 
the  more  our  faith  in  it,  as  such  a  fine  thing  in  itself, 
is  justified.  Almost  immediately  after  the  precipi- 
tated marriage  of  the  daughter  of  the  house  has  taken 
place,  the  Clesinger  couple,  avid  and  insolent,  of  a 
breadth  of  old  time  impudence  in  fact  of  which  our 
paler  day  has  lost  the  pattern,  are  back  on  the  mother's 
hands,  to  the  effect  of  a  vividest  picture  of  Maurice 
well-nigh  in  a  death-grapple  with  his  apparently  quite 
monstrous  "bounder"  of  a  brother-in-law,  a  picture 
that  further  gives  us  Madame  Sand  herself  smiting 
Clesinger  in  the  face  and  receiving  from  him  a  blow 
in  the  breast,  while  Solange  "coldly,"  with  an  iciness 
indeed  peculiarly  her  own,  fans  the  rage  and  approves 
her  husband's  assault,  and  while  the  divine  composer, 
though  for  that  moment  much  in  the  background,  ap- 
proves the  wondrous  approval.  He  still  approves,  to 
all  appearance,  the  daughter's  interpretation  of  the 
mother's  wish  to  "get  rid"  of  him  as  the  result  of  an 


GEORGE  SAND  239 

amorous  design  on  the  latter's  part  in  respect  of  a 
young  man  lately  introduced  to  the  circle  as  Maurice's 
friend  and  for  the  intimate  relation  with  whom  it  is 
thus  desirable  that  the  coast  shall  be  made  clear. 
How  else  than  through  no  fewer  consistencies  of  the 
unedifying  on  the  part  of  these  provokers  of  the  ex- 
pressional  reaction  should  we  have  come  by  innumer- 
able fine  epistolary  passages,  passages  constituting  in 
themselves  verily  such  adornments  of  the  tale,  such 
notes  in  the  scale  of  all  the  damaged  dignity  redressed, 
that  we  should  be  morally  the  poorer  without  them  ? 
One  of  the  vividest  glimpses  indeed  is  not  in  a  letter 
but  in  a  few  lines  from  "L'Histoire  de  ma  Vie,"  the 
composition  of  which  was  begun  toward  the  end  of 
this  period  and  while  its  shadow  still  hung  about — 
early  in  life  for  a  projected  autobiography,  inasmuch 
as  the  author  had  not  then  reached  her  forty-fifth 
year.  Chopin  at  work,  improvising  and  composing, 
was  apt  to  become  a  prey  to  doubts  and  depressions, 
so  that  there  were  times  when  to  break  in  upon  these 
was  to  render  him  a  service. 

But  it  was  not  always  possible  to  induce  him  to  leave  the  piano, 
often  so  much  more  his  torment  than  his  joy,  and  he  began  grad- 
ually to  resent  my  proposing  he  should  do  so.  I  never  ventured 
on  these  occasions  to  insist.  Chopin  in  displeasure  was  appalling, 
and  as  with  me  he  always  controlled  himself  it  was  as  if  he  might 
die  of  suffocation. 

It  is  a  vision  of  the  possibilities  of  vibration  in  such 
organisms  that  does  in  fact  appal,  and  with  the  clash 
of  vibrations,  those  both  of  genius  and  of  the  general 
less  sanctioned  sensibility,  the  air  must  have  more  than 
sufficiently  resounded.  Some  eight  years  after  the  be- 
ginning of  their  friendship  and  the  year  after  the  final 


24o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

complete  break  in  it  she  writes  to  Madame  Pauline 
Viardot: 

Do  you  see  Chopin  ?  Tell  me  about  his  health.  I  have  been 
unable  to  repay  his  fury  and  his  hatred  by  hatred  and  fury.  I 
think  of  him  as  of  a  sick,  embittered,  bewildered  child.  I  saw 
much  of  Solange  in  Paris,  the  letter  goes  on,  and  made  her  my  con- 
stant occupation,  but  without  finding  anything  but  a  stone  in  the 
place  of  her  heart.  I  have  taken  up  my  work  again  while  waiting 
for  the  tide  to  carry  me  elsewhere. 

All  the  author's  "authority"  is  in  these  few  words, 
and  in  none  more  than  in  the  glance  at  the  work  and 
the  tide.  The  work  and  the  tide  rose  ever  as  high  as 
she  would  to  float  her,  and  wherever  we  look  there  is 
always  the  authority.  "I  find  Chopin  magnificent" 
she  had  already  written  from  the  thick  of  the  fray,  "to 
keep  seeing,  frequenting  and  approving  Clesinger,  who 
struck  me  because  I  snatched  from  his  hands  the 
hammer  he  had  raised  upon  Maurice — Chopin  whom 
every  one  talks  of  as  my  most  faithful  and  devoted 
friend."  Well  indeed  may  our  biographer  have  put  it 
that  from  a  certain  date  in  May  1847  "the  two  Leit- 
motive  which  might  have  been  called  in  the  terms  of 
Wagner  the  Leitmotif  of  soreness  and  the  Leitmotif  of 
despair — Chopin,  Solange — sound  together  now  in 
fusion,  now  in  a  mutual  grip,  now  simply  side  by  side, 
in  all  Madame  Sand's  unpublished  letters  and  in  the 
few  (of  the  moment)  that  have  been  published.  A 
little  later  a  third  joins  in — Augustine  Brault,  a  motive 
narrowly  and  tragically  linked  to  the  basso  obligate  of 
Solange."  To  meet  such  a  passage  as  the  following 
under  our  heroine's  hand  again  is  to  feel  the  whole 
temper  of  intercourse  implied  slip  straight  out  of  our 
analytic  grasp.  The  allusion  is  to  Chopin  and  to  the 
"defection"  of  which  he  had  been  guilty,  to  her  view, 


GEORGE  SAND  241 

at  the  time  when  it  had  been  most  important  that 
she  might  count  on  him.  What  we  have  first,  as  out- 
siders, to  swallow  down,  as  it  were,  is  the  state  of 
things,  the  hysteric  pitch  of  family  life,  in  which  any 
ideal  of  reticence,  any  principle,  as  we  know  it,  of 
minding  one's  business,  for  mere  dignity's  sake  if  for 
none  other,  had  undergone  such  collapse. 

I  grant  you  I  am  not  sorry  that  he  has  withdrawn  from  me  the 
government  of  his  life,  for  which  both  he  and  his  friends  wanted 
to  make  me  responsible  in  so  much  too  absolute  a  fashion.  His 
temper  kept  growing  in  asperity,  so  that  it  had  come  to  his  con- 
stantly blowing  me  up,  from  spite,  ill-humour  and  jealousy,  in 
presence  of  my  friends  and  my  children.  Solange  made  use  of  it 
with  the  astuteness  that  belongs  to  her,  while  Maurice  began  to 
give  way  to  indignation.  Knowing  and  seeing  la  chastete  de  nos 
rapports,  he  saw  also  that  the  poor  sick  soul  took  up,  without 
wanting  to  and  perhaps  without  being  able  to  help  it,  the  attitude 
of  the  lover,  the  husband,  the  proprietor  of  my  thoughts  and  actions. 
He  was  on  the  point  of  breaking  out  and  telling  him  to  his  face 
that  he  was  making  me  play,  at  forty-three  years  of  age,  a  ridiculous 
part,  and  that  it  was  an  abuse  of  my  kindness,  my  patience,  and  my 
pity  for  his  nervous  morbid  state.  A  few  months  more,  a  few  days 
perhaps,  of  this  situation,  and  an  impossible  frightful  struggle 
would  have  broken  out  between  them.  Foreseeing  the  storm,  I 
took  advantage  of  Chopin's  predilection  for  Solange  and  left  him 
to  sulk,  without  an  effort  to  bring  him  round.  We  have  not  for 
three  months  exchanged  a  word  in  writing,  and  I  don't  know  how 
such  a  cooling-off  will  end. 

She  develops  the  picture  of  the  extravagance  of  his 
sick  irritability;  she  accepts  with  indifference  the  cer- 
tainty that  his  friends  will  accuse  her  of  having  cast 
him  out  to  take  a  lover;  the  one  thing  she  "minds"  is 
the  force  of  evil  in  her  daughter,  who  is  the  centre  of 
all  the  treachery.  "She  will  come  back  to  me  when 
she  needs  me,  that  I  know.  But  her  return  will  be 
neither  tender  nor  consoling."  Therefore  it  is  when  at 


242  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

the  beginning  of  the  winter  of  this  same  dreadful  year 
she  throws  off  the  free  rich  summary  of  what  she  has 
been  through  in  the  letter  to  M.  Charles  Poncy  already 
published  in  her  Correspondence  we  are  swept  into 
the  current  of  sympathy  and  admiration.  The  pre- 
ceding months  had  been  the  heaviest  and  most  pain- 
ful of  her  life. 

I  all  but  broke  down  under  them  utterly,  though  I  had  for  long 
seen  them  coming.  But  you  know  how  one  is  not  always  overhung 
by  the  evil  portent,  however  clear  one  may  read  it — there  are  days, 
weeks,  even  whole  months,  when  one  lives  on  illusion  and  fondly 
hopes  to  divert  the  blow  that  threatens.  It  is  always  at  last  the 
most  probable  ill  that  surprises  us  unarmed  and  unprepared.  To 
this  explosion  of  unhappy  underground  germs  joined  themselves 
sundry  contributive  matters,  bitter  things  too  and  quite  unex- 
pected; so  that  I  am  broken  by  grief  in  body  and  soul.  I  believe 
my  grief  incurable,  for  I  never  succeed  in  throwing  it  off  for  a  few 
hours  without  its  coming  upon  me  again  during  the  next  in  greater 
force  and  gloom.  I  nevertheless  struggle  against  it  without  res- 
pite, and  if  I  don't  hope  for  a  victory  which  would  have  to  con- 
sist of  not  feeling  at  all,  at  least  I  have  reached  that  of  still  bearing 
with  life,  of  even  scarcely  feeling  ill,  of  having  recovered  my  taste 
for  work  and  of  not  showing  my  distress.  I  have  got  back  outside 
calm  and  cheer,  which  are  so  necessary  for  others,  and  everything 
in  my  life  seems  to  go  on  well. 

We  had  already  become  aware,  through  commemora- 
tions previous  to  the  present,  of  that  first  or  innermost 
line  of  defence  residing  in  George  Sand's  splendid 
mastery  of  the  letter,  the  gift  that  was  always  so  to 
assure  her,  on  every  issue,  the  enjoyment  of  the  first 
chance  with  posterity.  The  mere  cerebral  and  manual 
activity  represented  by  the  quantity  no  less  than  the 
quality  of  her  outflow  through  the  post  at  a  season 
when  her  engagements  were  most  pressing  and  her 
anxieties  of  every  sort  most  cruel  is  justly  qualified  by 


GEORGE  SAND  243 

Madame  Karenine  as  astounding;  the  new  letters  here 
given  to  the  world  heaping  up  the  exhibition  and  testi- 
fying even  beyond  the  finest  of  those  gathered  in  after 
the  writer's  death — the  mutilations,  suppressions  and 
other  freedoms  then  used,  for  that  matter,  being  now 
exposed.  If  no  plot  of  her  most  bustling  fiction  ever 
thickened  at  the  rate  at  which  those  agitations  of  her 
inner  circle  at  which  we  have  glanced  multiplied  upon 
her  hands  through  the  later  'forties,  so  we  are  tempted 
to  find  her  rather  less  in  possession  of  her  great  moyens 
when  handling  the  artificial  presentation  than  when 
handling  what  we  may  call  the  natural.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  long  letter  addressed  to  the  cyn- 
ical Solange  in  April  '52,  and  which  these  pages  give 
us  in  extenso,  would  have  made  the  fortune  of  any 
mere  interesting  "story"  in  which  one  of  the  char- 
acters might  have  been  presented  as  writing  it.  It  is 
a  document  of  the  highest  psychological  value  and  a 
practical  summary  of  all  the  elements  of  the  writer's 
genius,  of  all  her  indefeasible  advantages;  it  is  verily 
the  gem  of  her  biographer's  collection.  Taken  in  con- 
nection with  a  copious  communication  to  her  son,  of 
the  previous  year,  on  the  subject  of  his  sister's  char- 
acter and  vices,  and  of  their  common  experience  of 
these,  it  offers,  in  its  ease  of  movement,  its  extraor- 
dinary frankness  and  lucidity,  its  splendid  apprehen- 
sion and  interpretation  of  realities,  its  state,  as  it  were, 
of  saturation  with  these,  exactly  the  kind  of  interest 
for  which  her  novels  were  held  remarkable,  but  in  a 
degree  even  above  their  maximum.  Such  a  letter  is 
an  effusion  of  the  highest  price;  none  of  a  weight  so 
baffling  to  estimation  was  probably  ever  inspired  in  a 
mother  by  solicitude  for  a  clever  daughter's  possibil- 
ities. Never  surely  had  an  accomplished  daughter 


244  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

laid  under  such  contribution  a  mother  of  high  culture; 
never  had  such  remarkable  and  pertinent  things  had 
to  flow  from  such  a  source;  never  in  fine  was  so  urgent 
an  occasion  so  admirably,  so  inimitably  risen  to. 
Marvellous  through  it  all  is  the  way  in  which,  while  a 
common  recognition  of  the  "facts  of  life,"  as  between 
two  perfectly  intelligent  men  of  the  world,  gives  the 
whole  diapason,  the  abdication  of  moral  authority 
and  of  the  rights  of  wisdom  never  takes  place.  The 
tone  is  a  high  implication  of  the  moral  advantages  that 
Solange  had  inveterately  enjoyed  and  had  decided 
none  the  less  to  avail  herself  of  so  little;  which  advan- 
tages we  absolutely  believe  in  as  we  read — there  is  the 
prodigious  part:  such  an  education  of  the  soul,  and  in 
fact  of  every  faculty,  such  a  claim  for  the  irreproach- 
able, it  would  fairly  seem,  do  we  feel  any  association 
with  the  great  fluent  artist,  in  whatever  conditions 
taking  place,  inevitably,  necessarily  to  have  been. 
If  we  put  ourselves  questions  we  yet  wave  away 
doubts,  and  with  whatever  remnants  of  prejudice  the 
writer's  last  word  may  often  have  to  clash,  our  own  is 
that  there  is  nothing  for  grand  final  Tightness  like  a 
sufficiently  general  humanity — when  a  particularly 
beautiful  voice  happens  to  serve  it. 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO 

1902 

THE  great  feast-days  of  all,  for  the  restless  critic,  are 
those  much  interspaced  occasions  of  his  really  meeting 
a  "case,"  as  he  soon  enough  learns  to  call,  for  his 
convenience  and  assistance,  any  supremely  contribu- 
tive  or  determinant  party  to  the  critical  question. 
These  are  recognitions  that  make  up  for  many  dull 
hours  and  dry  contacts,  many  a  thankless,  a  discon- 
certed gaze  into  faces  that  have  proved  expressionless. 
Always  looking,  always  hoping  for  his  happiest  chance, 
the  inquirer  into  the  reasons  of  things — by  which  I 
mean  especially  into  the  reasons  of  books — so  often 
misses  it,  so  often  wastes  his  steps  and  withdraws  his 
confidence,  that  he  inevitably  works  out  for  himself, 
sooner  or  later,  some  handy  principle  of  recognition. 
It  may  be  a  rough  thing,  a  mere  home-made  tool  of 
his  trade,  but  it  serves  his  purpose  if  it  keeps  him  from 
beginning  with  mistakes.  He  becomes  able  to  note  in 
its  light  the  signs  and  marks  of  the  possible  precious 
identity,  able  to  weigh  with  some  exactitude  the  ap- 
pearances that  make  for  its  reality.  He  ends,  through 
much  expenditure  of  patience,  by  seeing  when,  how, 
why,  the  "case"  announces  and  presents  itself,  and  he 
perhaps  even  feels  that  failure  and  felicity  have  worked 
together  to  produce  in  him  a  sense  for  it  that  may  at 
last  be  trusted  as  an  instinct.  He  thus  arrives  at  a 
view  of  all  the  candidates,  frequently  interesting 

245 


246  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

enough,  who  fall  short  of  the  effective  title,  because  he 
has  at  need,  perhaps  even  from  afar,  scented  along  the 
wind  the  strongest  member  of  the  herd.  He  may  per- 
haps not  always  be  able  to  give  us  the  grounds  of  his 
certainty,  but  he  is  at  least  never  without  knowing  it 
in  presence  of  one  of  the  full-blown  products  that 
are  the  joy  of  the  analyst.  He  recognises  as  well 
how  the  state  of  being  full-blown  comes  above  all 
from  the  achievement  of  consistency,  of  that  last  con- 
sistency which  springs  from  the  unrestricted  enjoyment 
of  freedom. 

Many  of  us  will  doubtless  not  have  forgotten  how 
we  were  witnesses  a  certain  number  of  years  since  to  a 
season  and  a  society  that  had  found  themselves  of  a 
sudden  roused,  as  from  some  deep  drugged  sleep,  to 
the  conception  of  the  "esthetic"  law  of  life;  in  conse- 
quence of  which  this  happy  thought  had  begun  to  re- 
ceive the  honours  of  a  lively  appetite  and  an  eager 
curiosity,  but  was  at  the  same  time  surrounded  and 
manipulated  by  as  many  different  kinds  of  inexpertness 
as  probably  ever  huddled  together  on  a  single  pretext. 
The  spectacle  was  strange  and  finally  was  wearisome, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  the  principle  in  question, 
once  it  was  proclaimed — a  principle  not  easily  for- 
mulated, but  which  we  may  conveniently  speak  of 
as  that  of  beauty  at  any  price,  beauty  appealing  alike 
to  the  senses  and  to  the  mind — was  never  felt  to  fall 
into  its  place  as  really  adopted  and  efficient.  It  re- 
mained for  us  a  queer  high-flavoured  fruit  from  over- 
seas, grown  under  another  sun  than  ours,  passed  round 
and  solemnly  partaken  of  at  banquets  organised  to  try 
it,  but  not  found  on  the  whole  really  to  agree  with  us, 
not  proving  thoroughly  digestible.  It  brought  with  it 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  247 

no  repose,  brought  with  it  only  agitation.  We  were 
not  really,  not  fully  convinced,  for  the  state  of  convic- 
tion is  quiet.  This  was  to  have  been  the  state  itself 
—that  is  the  state  of  mind  achieved  and  established— 
in  which  we  were  to  know  ugliness  no  more,  to  make 
the  esthetic  consciousness  feel  at  home  with  us,  or 
learn  ourselves  at  any  rate  to  feel  at  home  with  it. 
That  would  have  been  the  reign  of  peace,  the  supreme 
beatitude;  but  stability  continued  to  elude  us.  We 
had  mustered  a  hundred  good  reasons  for  it,  yet  the 
reasons  but  lighted  up  our  desert.  They  failed  to 
flower  into  a  single  concrete  esthetic  "type."  One 
authentic,  one  masterful  specimen  would  have  done 
wonders  for  us,  would  at  least  have  assuaged  our  curios- 
ity. But  we  were  to  be  left  till  lately  with  our  curios- 
ity on  our  hands. 

This  is  a  yearning,  however,  that  Signor  D'Annunzio 
may  at  last  strike  us  as  supremely  formed  to  gratify; 
so  promptly  we  find  in  him  as  a  literary  figure  the  high- 
est expression  of  the  reality  that  our  own  conditions 
were  to  fail  of  making  possible.  He  has  immediately 
the  value  of  giving  us  by  his  mere  logical  unfolding 
the  measure  of  our  shortcomings  in  the  same  direction, 
that  of  our  timidities  and  penuries  and  failures.  He 
throws  a  straighter  and  more  inevitable  light  on  the 
esthetic  consciousness  than  has,  to  my  sense,  in  our 
time,  reached  it  from  any  other  quarter;  and  there  is 
many  a  mystery  that  properly  interrogated  he  may 
help  to  clear  up  for  us,  many  an  explanation  of  our 
misadventure  that — as  I  have  glanced  at  it — he  may 
give.  He  starts  with  the  immense  advantage  of  enjoy- 
ing the  invoked  boon  by  grace  and  not  by  effort,  of 
claiming  it  under  another  title  than  the  sweat  of  his 


248  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

brow  and  the  aspiration  of  his  culture.  He  testifies 
to  the  influence  of  things  that  have  had  time  to  get 
themselves  taken  for  granted.  Beauty  at  any  price  is 
an  old  story  to  him;  art  and  form  and  style  as  the  aim 
of  the  superior  life  are  a  matter  of  course;  and  it  may 
be  said  of  him,  I  think,  that,  thanks  to  these  trans- 
mitted and  implanted  instincts  and  aptitudes,  his  in- 
dividual development  begins  where  the  struggle  of  the 
mere  earnest  questioner  ends.  Signor  D'Annunzio  is 
earnest  in  his  way,  quite  extraordinarily — which  is  a 
feature  of  his  physiognomy  that  we  shall  presently 
come  to  and  about  which  there  will  be  something  to 
say;  but  we  feel  him  all  the  while  in  such  secure  pos- 
session of  his  heritage  of  favouring  circumstance  that 
his  sense  of  intellectual  responsibility  is  almost  out  of 
proportion.  This  is  one  of  his  interesting  special  marks, 
the  manner  in  which  the  play  of  the  esthetic  instinct 
in  him  takes  on,  for  positive  extravagance  and  as  a 
last  refinement  of  freedom,  the  crown  of  solicitude  and 
anxiety.  Such  things  but  make  with  him  for  ornament 
and  parade;  they  are  his  tribute  to  civility;  the  essence 
of  the  matter  is  meanwhile  in  his  blood  and  his  bones. 
No  mistake  was  possible  from  the  first  as  to  his  being 
of  the  inner  literary  camp — a  new  form  altogether  of 
perceptive  and  expressive  energy;  the  question  was 
settled  by  the  intensity  and  variety,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  precocity,  of  his  early  poetic  production. 

Born  at  Pescara,  in  the  Regno,  the  old  kingdom  of 
Naples,  "toward"  1863,  as  I  find  noted  by  a  cautious 
biographer,  he  had  while  scarce  out  of  his  teens  allowed 
his  lyric  genius  full  opportunity  of  scandalising  even 
the  moderately  austere.  He  defined  himself  betimes 
very  much  as  he  was  to  remain,  a  rare  imagination,  a 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  249 

poetic,  an  artistic  intelligence  of  extraordinary  range 
and  fineness  concentrated  almost  wholly  on  the  life  of 
the  senses.  For  the  critic  who  simplifies  a  little  to 
state  clearly,  the  only  ideas  he  urges  upon  us  are  the 
erotic  and  the  plastic,  which  have  for  him  about  an 
equal  intensity,  or  of  which  it  would  be  doubtless  more 
correct  to  say  that  he  makes  them  interchangeable 
faces  of  the  same  figure.  He  began  his  career  by 
playing  with  them  together  in  verse,  to  innumerable 
light  tunes  and  with  an  extraordinary  general  effect  of 
curiosity  and  brilliancy.  He  has  continued  still  more 
strikingly  to  play  with  them  in  prose;  they  have  re- 
mained the  substance  of  his  intellectual  furniture. 
It  is  of  his  prose  only,  however,  that,  leaving  aside  the 
Intermezzo,  L'Isotteo,  La  Chimera,  Odi  Navali  and 
other  such  matters,  I  propose  to  speak,  the  subject 
being  of  itself  ample  for  one  occasion.  His  five  novels 
and  his  four  plays  have  extended  his  fame;  they  sug- 
gest by  themselves  as  many  observations  as  we  shall 
have  space  for.  The  group  of  productions,  as  the 
literary  industry  proceeds  among  us  to-day,  is  not 
large,  but  we  may  doubt  if  a  talent  and  a  temperament, 
if  indeed  a  whole  "view  of  life,"  ever  built  themselves 
up  as  vividly  for  the  reader  out  of  so  few  blocks.  The 
writer  is  even  yet  enviably  young;  but  this  solidity  of 
his  literary  image,  as  of  something  already  seated  on 
time  and  accumulation,  makes  him  a  rare  example. 
Precocity  is  somehow  an  inadequate  name  for  it,  as 
precocity  seldom  gets  away  from  the  element  of 
promise,  and  it  is  not  exactly  promise  that  blooms  in 
the  hard  maturity  of  such  a  performance  as  "The 
Triumph  of  Death."  There  are  certain  expressions  of 
experience,  of  the  experience  of  the  whole  man,  that 
are  like  final  milestones,  milestones  for  his  possible 


NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

fertility  if  not  for  his  possible  dexterity;  a  truth  that 
has  not  indeed  prevented  "II  Fuoco,"  with  its  doubtless 
still  ampler  finality,  from  following  the  work  just  men- 
tioned. And  we  have  had  particularly  before  us,  in 
verse,  I  must  add,  "Francesca  da  Rimini,"  with  the 
great  impression  a  great  actress  has  enabled  this  drama 
to  make. 

Only  I  must  immediately  in  this  connection  also  add 
that  Signor  D'Annunzio's  plays  are,  beside  his  novels, 
of  decidedly  minor  weight;  testifying  abundantly  to 
his  style,  his  romantic  sense  and  his  command  of  images, 
but  standing  in  spite  of  their  eloquence  only  for  half 
of  his  talent,  largely  as  he  yet  appears  in  "II  Fuoco"  to 
announce  himself  by  implication  as  an  intending,  in- 
deed as  a  pre-eminent  dramatist.  The  example  is 
interesting  when  we  catch  in  the  fact  the  opportunity 
for  comparing  with  the  last  closeness  the  capacity  of 
the  two  rival  canvases,  as  they  become  for  the  occasion, 
on  which  the  picture  of  life  may  be  painted.  The 
closeness  is  never  so  great,  the  comparison  never  so 
pertinent,  as  when  the  separate  efforts  are  but  different 
phases  of  the  same  talent.  It  is  not  at  any  rate  under 
this  juxtaposition  that  the  infinitely  greater  amplitude 
of  portrayal  resident  in  the  novel  strikes  us  least.  It 
in  fact  strikes  us  the  more,  in  this  quarter,  for  Signor 
D'Annunzio,  that  his  plays  have  been  with  one  excep- 
tion successes.  We  must  none  the  less  take  "Fran- 
cesca" but  for  a  success  of  curiosity;  on  the  part  of 
the  author  I  mean  even  more  than  on  the  part  of  the 
public.  It  is  primarily  a  pictorial  and  ingenious  thing 
and,  as  a  picture  of  passion,  takes,  in  the  total  col- 
lection, despite  its  felicities  of  surface  and  arrangement, 
distinctly  a  "back  seat."  Scarcely  less  than  its  com- 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  251 

panions  it  overflows  with  the  writer's  plenitude  of 
verbal  expression,  thanks  to  which,  largely,  the  series 
will  always  prompt  a  curiosity  and  even  a  tenderness 
in  any  reader  interested  precisely  in  this  momentous 
question  of  "style  in  a  play" — interested  in  particular 
to  learn  by  what  esthetic  chemistry  a  play  would  as  a 
work  of  art  propose  to  eschew  it.  It  is  in  any  such 
connection  so  inexpugnable  that  we  have  only  to  be 
cheated  of  it  in  one  place  to  feel  the  subject  cry  aloud 
for  it,  like  a  sick  man  forsaken,  in  another. 

I  may  mention  at  all  events  the  slightly  perverse  fact 
that,  thanks,  on  this  side,  to  the  highest  watermark  of 
translation,  Signor  D'Annunzio  makes  his  best  appeal 
to  the  English  public  as  a  dramatist.  Of  each  of  the 
three  English  versions  of  other  examples  of  his  work 
whose  titles  are  inscribed  at  the  beginning  of  these 
remarks  it  may  be  said  that  they  are  adequate  and 
respectable  considering  the  great  difficulty  encountered. 
The  author's  highest  good  fortune  has  nevertheless 
been  at  the  hands  of  his  French  interpreter,  who  has 
managed  to  keep  constantly  close  to  him — allowing 
for  an  occasional  inconsequent  failure  of  courage  when 
the  directness  of  the  original  brave  Vhonnetete — and 
yet  to  achieve  a  tone  not  less  idiomatic,  and  above  all 
not  less  marked  by  "authority,"  than  his  own.  Mr. 
Arthur  Symons,  among  ourselves,  however,  has  ren- 
dered the  somewhat  insistent  eloquence  of  "La  Gio- 
conda"  and  the  intricate  and  difficult  verse  of  "Fran- 
cesca"  with  all  due  sympathy,  and  in  the  latter  case 
especially — a  highly  arduous  task — with  remarkably 
patient  skill.  It  is  not  his  fault,  doubtless,  if  the  feet 
of  his  English  text  strike  us  as  moving  with  less  free- 
dom than  those  of  his  original;  such  being  the  hard 


252  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

price  paid  always  by  the  translator  who  tries  for  cor- 
respondence from  step  to  step,  tries  for  an  identical 
order.  Even  less  is  he  responsible  for  its  coming  still 
more  home  to  us  in  a  translation  that  the  meagre  anec- 
dote here  furnishing  the  subject,  and  on  which  the 
large  superstructure  rests,  does  not  really  lend  itself 
to  those  developments  that  make  a  full  or  an  interest- 
ing tragic  complexity.  Behind  the  glamour  of  its  im- 
mense literary  association  the  subject  of  "Francesca" 
is  for  purposes  of  essential,  of  enlarged  exhibition  de- 
lusive and  "short." 

These,  however,  are  for  the  moment  side-issues; 
what  is  more  relevant  is  the  stride  taken  by  our  author's 
early  progress  in  his  first  novel  and  his  second,  "II 
Piacere"  and  "LTnnocente";  a  pair  from  the  fresh- 
ness, the  direct  young  energy  of  which  he  was,  for  some 
of  his  admirers,  too  promptly  and  to  markedly  to  de- 
cline. We  may  take  it  as  characteristic  of  the  intensity 
of  the  literary  life  in  him  that  his  brief  career  falls 
already  thus  into  periods  and  supplies  a  quantity  of 
history  sufficient  for  those  differences  among  students 
by  which  the  dignity  of  history  appears  mainly  to  be 
preserved.  The  nature  of  his  prime  inspiration  I  have 
already  glanced  at;  and  we  are  helped  to  a  character- 
isation if  I  say  that  the  famous  enthroned  "beauty" 
which  operates  here,  so  straight,  as  the  great  obses- 
sion, is  not  in  any  perceptible  degree  moral  beauty.  It 
would  be  difficult  perhaps  to  find  elsewhere  in  the 
same  compass  so  much  expression  of  the  personal  life 
resting  so  little  on  any  picture  of  the  personal  char- 
acter and  the  personal  will.  It  is  not  that  Signor 
D'Annunzio  has  not  more  than  once  pushed  his  fur- 
row in  this  latter  direction;  but  nothing  is  exactly  more 


GABRlELE   D'ANNUNZIO  253 

interesting,  as  we  shall  see,  than  the  seemingly  inevi- 
table way  in  which  the  attempt  falls  short. 

"II  Piacere,"  the  first  in  date  of  the  five  tales,  has, 
though  with  imperfections,  the  merit  of  giving  us 
strongly  at  the  outset  the  author's  scale  and  range  of 
view,  and  of  so  constituting  a  sort  of  prophetic  summary 
of  his  elements.  All  that  is  done  in  the  later  things 
is  more  or  less  done  here,  and  nothing  is  absent  here 
that  we  are  not  afterwards  also  to  miss.  I  propose, 
however,  that  it  shall  not  be  prematurely  a  question 
with  us  of  what  we  miss;  no  intelligible  statement  of 
which,  for  that  matter,  in  such  considerations  as  these, 
is  ever  possible  till  there  has  been  some  adequate 
statement  of  what  we  find.  Count  Andrea  Sperelli  is 
a  young  man  who  pays,  pays  heavily,  as  we  take  it 
that  we  are  to  understand,  for  an  unbridled  surrender 
to  the  life  of  the  senses;  whereby  it  is  primarily  a  pic- 
ture of  that  life  that  the  story  gives  us.  He  is  repre- 
sented as  inordinately,  as  quite  monstrously,  endowed 
for  the  career  that  from  the  first  absorbs  and  that 
finally  is  to  be  held,  we  suppose,  to  engulf  him;  and  it 
is  a  tribute  to  the  truth  with  which  his  endowment  is 
presented  that  we  should  scarce  know  where  else  to 
look  for  so  complete  and  convincing  an  account  of 
such  adventures.  Casanova  de  Seingalt  is  of  course 
infinitely  more  copious,  but  his  autobiography  is  cheap 
loose  journalism  compared  with  the  directed,  finely- 
condensed  iridescent  epic  of  Count  Andrea. 

This  young  man's  years  have  run  but  half  their 
course  from  twenty  to  thirty  when  he  meets  and  be- 
comes entangled  with  a  woman  more  infernally  expert 
even  than  himself  in  the  matters  in  which  he  is  most 


254  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

expert — and  he  is  given  us  as  a  miracle  of  social  and  in- 
tellectual accomplishment — the  effect  of  whom  is 
fatally  to  pervert  and  poison  his  imagination.  As  his 
imagination  is  applied  exclusively  to  the  employments 
of  "love,"  this  means,  for  him,  a  frustration  of  all 
happiness,  all  comfortable  consistency,  in  subsequent 
relations  of  the  same  order.  The  author's  view — this 
is  fundamental — is  all  of  a  world  in  which  relations  of 
any  other  order  whatever  mainly  fail  to  offer  them- 
selves in  any  attractive  form.  Andrea  Sperelli,  loving, 
accordingly — in  the  manner  in  which  D'Annunzio's 
young  men  love  and  to  which  we  must  specifically  re- 
turn— a  woman  of  good  faith,  a  woman  as  different  as 
possible  from  the  creature  of  evil  communications,  finds 
the  vessel  of  his  spirit  itself  so  infected  and  disqualified 
that  it  falsifies  and  dries  up  everything  that  passes 
through  it.  The  idea  that  has  virtually  determined 
the  situation  appears  in  fact  to  be  that  the  hero  would 
have  loved  in  another  manner,  or  would  at  least  have 
wished  to,  but  that  he  had  too  promptly  put  any  such 
fortune,  so  far  as  his  capacity  is  concerned,  out  of  court. 
We  have  our  reasons,  presently  manifest,  for  doubting 
the  possibility  itself;  but  the  theory  has  nevertheless 
given  its  direction  to  the  fable. 

For  the  rest  the  author's  three  sharpest  signs  are 
already  unmistakable:  first  his  rare  notation  of  states 
of  excited  sensibility;  second  his  splendid  visual  sense, 
the  quick  generosity  of  his  response  to  the  message, 
as  we  nowadays  say,  of  aspects  and  appearances,  to 
the  beauty  of  places  and  things;  third  his  ample  and 
exquisite  style,  his  curious,  various,  inquisitive,  always 
active  employment  of  language  as  a  means  of  com- 
munication and  representation.  So  close  is  the  marriage 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  255 

between  his  power  of  "rendering,"  in  the  light  of  the 
imagination,  and  whatever  he  sees  and  feels,  that  we 
should  much  mislead  in  speaking  of  his  manner  as  a 
thing  distinct  from  the  matter  submitted  to  it.  The 
fusion  is  complete  and  admirable,  so  that,  though  his 
work  is  nothing  if  not  "literary,"  we  see  at  no  point  of 
it  where  literature  or  where  life  begins  or  ends:  we 
swallow  our  successive  morsels  with  as  little  question 
as  we  swallow  food  that  has  by  proper  preparation 
been  reduced  to  singleness  of  savour.  It  is  brought 
home  to  us  afresh  that  there  is  no  complete  creation 
without  style  any  more  than  there  is  complete  music 
without  sound;  also  that  when  language  becomes  as 
closely  applied  and  impressed  a  thing  as  for  the  most 
part  in  the  volumes  before  us  the  fact  of  artistic  crea- 
tion is  registered  at  a  stroke.  It  is  never  more  present 
than  in  the  thick-sown  illustrative  images  and  figures 
that  fairly  bloom  under  D'Annunzio's  hand.  I  find 
examples  in  "II  Piacere,"  as  elsewhere,  by  simply 
turning  the  pages.  "His  will" — of  the  hero's  weakness 
•"useless  as  a  sword  of  base  temper  hung  at  the  side 
of  a  drunkard  or  a  dullard."  Or  of  his  own  southern 
land  in  September:  "I  scarce  know  why,  looking  at  the 
country  in  this  season,  I  always  think  of  some  beauti- 
ful woman  after  childbirth,  who  lies  back  in  her 
white  bed,  smiling  with  a  pale  astonished  inextinguish- 
able smile."  Or  the  incision  of  this:  "Where  for  him 
now  were  those  unclean  short-lived  loves  that  left  in 
the  mouth  the  strange  acidity  of  fruit  cut  with  a  steel 
knife  ?"  Or  the  felicity  of  the  following,  of  a  southern 
night  seen  and  felt  from  the  terrace  of  a  villa.  "Clear 
meteors  at  intervals  streaked  the  motionless  air, 
running  over  it  as  lightly  and  silently  as  drops  of  water 
on  a  crystal  pane."  "The  sails  on  the  sea,"  he  says  of 


256  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

the  same  look-out  by  day,  "were  as  pious  and  number- 
less as  the  wings  of  cherubim  on  the  gold  grounds  of  old 
Giottesque  panels." 

But  it  is  above  all  here  for  two  things  that  his  faculty 
is  admirable;  one  of  them  his  making  us  feel  through 
the  windows  of  his  situation,  or  the  gaps,  as  it  were,  of 
his  flowering  wood,  the  golden  presence  of  Rome,  the 
charm  that  appeals  to  him  as  if  he  were  one  of  the  pil- 
grims from  afar,  save  that  he  reproduces  it  with  an 
authority  in  which,  as  we  have  seen,  the  pilgrims  from 
afar  have  mainly  been  deficient.  The  other  is  the 
whole  category  of  the  phenomena  of  "passion,"  as 
passion  prevails  between  his  men  and  his  women — and 
scarcely  anything  else  prevails;  the  states  of  feeling,  of 
ecstasy  and  suffering  engendered,  the  play  of  sensibil- 
ity from  end  to  end  of  the  scale.  In  this  direction  he 
has  left  no  dropped  stitches  for  any  worker  of  like 
tapestries  to  pick  up.  We  shall  here  have  made  out 
that  many  of  his  "values"  are  much  to  be  contested, 
but  that  where  they  are  true  they  are  as  fresh  as  dis- 
coveries; witness  the  passage  where  Sperelli,  driving 
back  to  Rome  after  a  steeplechase  in  which  he  has  been 
at  the  supreme  moment  worsted,  meets  nothing  that 
does  not  play  with  significance  into  his  vision  and  act 
with  force  on  his  nerves.  He  has  before  the  race  had 
"words,"  almost  blows,  on  the  subject  of  one  of  the 
ladies  present,  with  one  of  the  other  riders,  of  which 
the  result  is  that  they  are  to  send  each  other  their 
seconds;  but  the  omens  are  not  for  his  adversary,  in 
spite  of  the  latter's  success  on  the  course. 

From  the  mail-coach,  on  the  return,  he  overtook  the  flight 
toward  Rome  of  Giannetto  Rutolo,  seated  in  a  small  two-wheeled 
trap,  behind  the  quick  trot  of  a  great  roan,  over  whom  he  bent 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  257 

with  tight  reins,  holding  his  head  down  and  his  cigar  in  his  teeth, 
heedless  of  the  attempts  of  policemen  to  keep  him  in  line.  Rome, 
in  the  distance,  stood  up  dark  against  a  zone  of  light  as  yellow  as 
sulphur;  and  the  statues  crowning  St.  John  Lateran  looked  huge, 
above  the  zone,  in  their  violet  sky.  Then  it  was  that  Andrea  fully 
knew  the  -pain  he  was  making  another  soul  suffer. 

Nothing  could  be  more  characteristic  of  the  writer 
than  the  way  what  has  preceded  flowers  into  that  last 
reality;  and  equally  in  his  best  manner,  doubtless,  is 
such  a  passage  as  the  following  from  the  same  volume, 
which  treats  of  the  hero's  first  visit  to  the  sinister  great 
lady  whose  influence  on  his  soul  and  his  senses  is  to 
become  as  the  trail  of  a  serpent.  She  receives  him, 
after  their  first  accidental  meeting,  with  extraordinary 
promptitude  and  the  last  intimacy,  receives  him  in  the 
depths  of  a  great  Roman  palace  which  the  author, 
with  a  failure  of  taste  that  is,  unfortunately  for  him, 
on  ground  of  this  sort,  systematic,  makes  a  point  of 
naming.  "Then  they  ceased  to  speak.  Each  felt  the 
presence  of  the  other  flow  and  mingle  with  his  own, 
with  her  own,  very  blood;  till  it  was  her  blood  at  last 
that  seemed  to  have  become  his  life,  and  his  that  seemed 
to  have  become  hers.  The  room  grew  larger  in  the 
deep  silence;  the  crucifix  of  Guido  Reni  made  the 
shade  of  the  canopy  and  curtains  religious;  the  rumour 
of  the  city  came  to  them  like  the  murmur  of  some  far- 
away flood."  Or  take  for  an  instance  of  the  writer's 
way  of  showing  the  consciousness  as  a  full,  mixed  cup, 
of  touching  us  ourselves  with  the  mystery  at  work 
in  his  characters,  the  description  of  the  young  man's 
leaving  the  princely  apartments  in  question  after  the 
initiation  vouchsafed  to  him.  He  has  found  the  great 
lady  ill  in  bed,  with  remedies  and  medicine-bottles  at 
her  side,  but  not  too  ill,  as  we  have  seen,  to  make  him 


258  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

welcome.      "Farewell,"    she    has    said.      "Love    me! 
Remember!" 

It  seemed  to  him,  crossing  the  threshold  again,  that  he  heard 
behind  him  a  burst  of  sobs.  But  he  went  on,  a  little  uncertain, 
wavering  like  a  man  who  sees  imperfectly.  The  odour  of  the 
chloroform  clung  to  his  sense  like  some  fume  of  intoxication;  but 
at  each  step  something  intimate  passed  away  from  him,  wasting 
itself  in  the  air,  so  that,  impulsively,  instinctively,  he  would  have 
kept  himself  as  he  was,  have  closed  himself  in,  have  wrapped  him- 
self up  to  prevent  the  dispersion.  The  rooms  in  front  of  him  were 
deserted  and  dumb.  At  one  of  the  doors  "  Mademoiselle  "  appeared, 
with  no  sound  of  steps,  with  no  rustle  of  skirts,  standing  there  like 
a  ghost.  "This  way,  signer  conte.  You  won't  find  it."  She  had 
an  ambiguous,  irritating  smile,  and  her  curiosity  made  her  grey 
eyes  more  piercing.  Andrea  said  nothing.  The  woman's  pres- 
ence again  disconcerted  and  troubled  him,  affected  him  with  a 
vague  repugnance,  stirred  indeed  his  wrath. 

Even  the  best  things  suffer  by  detachment  from 
their  context;  but  so  it  is  that  we  are  in  possession  of 
the  young  man's  exit,  so  it  is  that  the  act  interests  us. 
Fully  announced  from  the  first,  among  these  things, 
was  D'Annunzio's  signal  gift  of  never  approaching  the 
thing  particularly  to  be  done,  the  thing  that  so  presents 
itself  to  the  painter,  without  consummately  doing  it. 
Each  of  his  volumes  offers  thus  its  little  gallery  of 
episodes  that  stand  out  like  the  larger  pearls  occurring 
at  intervals  on  a  string  of  beads.  The  steeplechase  in 
"II  Piacere,"  the  auction  sale  of  precious  trinkets  in 
Via  Sistina  on  the  wet  afternoon,  the  morning  in  the 
garden  at  Schifanoia,  by  the  southern  sea,  when  Donna 
Maria,  the  new  revelation,  first  comes  down  to  Andrea, 
who  awaits  her  there  in  the  languor  of  convalescence 
from  the  almost  fatal  wound  received  in  the  duel  of 
which  the  altercation  on  the  race-course  has  been  the 
issue:  the  manner  of  such  things  as  these  has  an  ex- 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  259 

traordinary  completeness  of  beauty.  But  they  are,  like 
similar  pages  in  "II  Trionfo"  and  "II  Fuoco,"  not 
things  for  adequate  citation,  not  things  that  lend 
themselves  as  some  of  the  briefer  felicities.  Donna 
Maria,  on  the  September  night  at  Schifanoia,  has  been 
playing  for  Andrea  and  their  hostess  certain  old  quaint 
gavottes  and  toccatas. 

It  lived  again  wondrously  beneath  her  fingers,  the  eighteenth- 
century  music,  so  melancholy  in  its  dance-tunes — tunes  that  might 
have  been  composed  to  be  danced,  on  languid  afternoons  of  some 
St.  Martin's  summer,  in  a  deserted  park,  among  hushed  fountains 
and  pedestals  without  their  statues,  over  carpets  of  dead  roses,  by 
pairs  of  lovers  soon  to  love  no  more. 

Autobiographic  in  form,  "LTnnocente"  sticks  closely 
to  its  theme,  and  though  the  form  is  on  the  whole  a 
disadvantage  to  it  the  texture  is  admirably  close.  The 
question  is  of  nothing  less  than  a  young  husband's  re- 
lation to  the  illegitimate  child  of  his  wife,  born  con- 
fessedly as  such,  and  so  born,  marvellous  to  say,  in 
spite  of  the  circumstance  that  the  wife  adores  him,  and 
of  the  fact  that,  though  long  grossly,  brutally  false  to 
her,  he  also  adores  his  wife.  To  state  these  data  is 
sufficiently  to  express  the  demand  truly  made  by  them 
for  superiority  of  treatment;  they  require  certainly  two 
or  three  almost  impossible  postulates.  But  we  of 
course  never  play  the  fair  critical  game  with  an  author, 
never  get  into  relation  with  him  at  all,  unless  we  grant 
him  his  postulates.  His  subject  is  what  is  given  him — 
given  him  by  influences,  by  a  process,  with  which  we 
have  nothing  to  do;  since  what  art,  what  revelation, 
can  ever  really  make  such  a  mystery,  such  a  passage 
in  the  private  life  of  the  intellect,  adequately  traceable 
for  us  ?  His  treatment  of  it,  on  the  other  hand,  is 


26o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

what  he  actively  gives;  and  it  is  with  what  he  gives 
that  we  are  critically  concerned.  If  there  is  nothing 
in  him  that  effectually  induces  us  to  make  the  postulate, 
he  is  then  empty  for  us  altogether,  and  the  sooner  we 
have  done  with  him  the  better;  little  as  the  truly  curious 
critic  enjoys,  as  a  general  thing,  having  publicly  to 
throw  up  the  sponge. 

Tullio  Hermil,  who  finally  compasses  the  death  of 
the  little  "innocent,"  the  small  intruder  whose  pres- 
ence in  the  family  life  has  become  too  intolerable,  re- 
traces with  a  master's  hand  each  step  of  the  process 
by  which  he  has  arrived  at  this  sole  issue.  Save  that 
his  wife  dumbly  divines  and  accepts  it  his  perpetration 
of  the  deed  is  not  suspected,  and  we  take  the  secret 
confession  of  which  the  book  consists  as  made  for  the 
relief  and  justification  of  his  conscience.  The  action 
all  goes  forward  in  that  sphere  of  exasperated  sensi- 
bility which  Signor  D'Annunzio  has  made  his  own  so 
triumphantly  that  other  story-tellers  strike  us  in  com- 
parison as  remaining  at  the  door  of  the  inner  precinct, 
as  listening  there  but  to  catch  an  occasional  faint  sound, 
while  he  alone  is  well  within  and  moving  through  the 
place  as  its  master.  The  sensibility  has  again  in  itself 
to  be  qualified;  the  exasperation  of  feeling  is  ever  the 
essence  of  the  intercourse  of  some  man  with  some 
woman  who  has  reduced  him,  as  in  "LTnnocente" 
and  in  "II  Trionfo,"  to  homicidal  madness,  or  of  some 
woman  with  some  man  who,  as  in  "II  Fuoco,"  and 
also  again  by  a  strange  duplication  of  its  office  in 
"LTnnocente,"  causes  her  atrociously  to  suffer.  The 
plane  of  the  situation  is  thus  visibly  a  singularly  special 
plane;  that,  always,  of  the  more  or  less  insanely  de- 
moralised pair  of  lovers,  for  neither  of  whom  is  any 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  261 

other  personal  relation  indicated  either  as  actual  or 
as  conceivably  possible.  Here,  it  may  be  said  on  such 
a  showing,  is  material  rather  alarmingly  cut  down  as 
to  range,  as  to  interest  and,  not  least,  as  to  charm; 
but  here  precisely  it  is  that,  by  a  wonderful  chance, 
the  author's  magic  comes  effectively  into  play. 

Little  in  fact  as  the  relation  of  the  erotically  exas- 
perated with  the  erotically  exasperated,  when  pushed 
on  either  side  to  frenzy,  would  appear  to  lend  itself  to 
luminous  developments,  the  difficulty  is  surmounted 
each  time  in  a  fashion  that,  for  consistency  no  less  than 
for  brilliancy,  is  all  the  author's  own.  Though  sur- 
mounted triumphantly  as  to  interest,  that  is,  the  trick 
is  played  without  the  least  falsification  of  the  luckless 
subjects  of  his  study.  They  remain  the  abject  vic- 
tims of  sensibility  that  his  plan  has  originally  made 
them;  they  remain  exasperated,  erotic,  hysterical, 
either  homicidally  or  suicidally  determined,  cut  off 
from  any  personal  source  of  life  that  does  not  poison 
them;  notwithstanding  all  of  which  they  neither  starve 
dramatically  nor  suffer  us  to  starve  with  them.  How 
then  is  this  seemingly  inevitable  catastrophe  pre- 
vented ?  We  ask  it  but  to  find  on  reflection  that  the 
answer  opens  the  door  to  their  historian's  whole  secret. 
The  unfortunates  are  deprived  of  any  enlarging  or 
saving  personal  relation,  that  is  of  any  beneficent 
reciprocity;  but  they  make  up  for  it  by  their  relation 
both  to  the  idea  in  general  and  to  the  whole  world  of 
the  senses,  which  is  the  completest  that  the  author 
can  conceive  for  them.  He  may  be  described  as  thus 
executing  on  their  behalf  an  artistic  volte-face  of  the 
most  effective  kind,  with  results  wonderful  to  note. 
The  world  of  the  senses,  with  which  he  surrounds  them 


262  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

— a  world  too  of  the  idea,  that  is  of  a  few  ideas  ad- 
mirably expressed — yields  them  such  a  crop  of  impres- 
sions that  the  need  of  other  occasions  to  vibrate  and 
respond,  to  act  or  to  aspire,  is  superseded  by  their 
immense  factitious  agitation.  This  agitation  runs  its 
course  in  strangely  brief  periods — a  singular  note,  the 
brevity,  of  every  situation;  but  the  period  is  while  it 
lasts,  for  all  its  human  and  social  poverty,  quite  in- 
ordinately peopled  and  furnished.  The  innumerable 
different  ways  in  which  his  concentrated  couples  are 
able  to  feel  about  each  other  and  about  their  enclosing 
cage  of  golden  wire,  the  nature  and  the  art  of  Italy— 
these  things  crowd  into  the  picture  and  pervade  it, 
lighting  it  scarcely  less,  strange  to  say,  because  they 
are  things  of  bitterness  and  woe. 

It  is  one  of  the  miracles  of  the  imagination;  the 
great  shining  element  in  which  the  characters  flounder 
and  suffer  becomes  rich  and  beautiful  for  them,  as 
well  as  in  so  many  ways  for  us,  by  the  action  of  the 
writer's  mind.  They  not  only  live  in  his  imagination, 
but  they  borrow  it  from  him  in  quantities;  indeed 
without  this  charitable  advance  they  would  be  poor 
creatures  enough,  for  they  have  in  each  case  almost 
nothing  of  their  own.  On  the  aid  thus  received  they 
start,  they  get  into  motion;  it  makes  their  common 
basis  of  "passion,"  desire,  enchantment,  aversion. 
The  essence  of  the  situation  is  the  same  in  "II  Trionfo" 
and  "II  Fuoco"  as  in  "LTnnocente":  the  tempo- 
rarily united  pair  devour  each  other,  tear  and  rend 
each  other,  wear  each  other  out  through  a  series  of 
erotic  convulsions  and  nervous  reactions  that  are  made 
interesting — interesting  to  us — almost  exclusively  by 
the  special  wealth  of  their  consciousness.  The  me- 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  263 

dium  in  which  they  move  is  admirably  reflected  in  it; 
the  autumn  light  of  Venice,  the  afterglow  of  her  past, 
in  the  drama  of  the  elderly  actress  and  the  young 
rhetorician  of  "II  Fuoco";  the  splendour  of  the  sum- 
mer by  the  edge  of  the  lower  Adriatic  in  that  of  the 
two  isolated  erotomaniacs  of  "II  Trionfo,"  indissolu- 
bly  linked  at  last  in  the  fury  of  physical  destruction 
into  which  the  man  drags  the  woman  by  way  of  retri- 
bution for  the  fury  of  physical  surrender  into  which 
she  has  beguiled  him. 

As  for  "L'Innocente"  again,  briefly,  there  is  perhaps 
nothing  in  it  to  match  the  Roman  passages  of  "II 
Piacere";  but  the  harmony  of  the  general,  the  outer 
conditions  pervades  the  picture;  the  sweetness  of  the 
villeggiatura  life,  the  happiness  of  place  and  air,  the 
lovability  of  the  enclosing  scene,  all  at  variance  with 
the  sharpness  of  the  inner  tragedy.  The  inner  tragedy 
of  "L'Innocente"  has  a  concentration  that  is  like  the 
carrying,  through  turns  and  twists,  upstairs  and  down, 
of  some  cup  filled  to  the  brim,  of  which  no  drop  is  yet 
spilled;  such  cumulative  truth  rules  the  scene  after 
we  have  once  accepted  the  postulate.  It  is  true  that 
the  situation  as  exhibited  involves  for  Giuliana,  the 
young  wife,  the  vulgarest  of  adventures;  yet  she  be- 
comes, as  it  unfolds,  the  figure  of  the  whole  gallery 
in  whom  the  pathetic  has  at  once  most  of  immediate 
truth  and  of  investing  poetry.  I  much  prefer  her  for 
beauty  and  interest  to  Donna  Maria  in  "II  Piacere," 
the  principal  other  image  of  faith  and  patience  sac- 
rificed. We  see  these  virtues  as  still  supreme  in  her 
even  while  she  faces,  in  advance,  her  ordeal,  in  respect 
to  which  it  has  been  her  hope,  in  fact  her  calculation, 
that  her  husband  will  have  been  deceived  about  the 


264  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

paternity  of  her  child;  and  she  is  so  truthfully  touch- 
ing when  this  possibility  breaks  down  that  even  though 
we  rub  our  eyes  at  the  kind  of  dignity  claimed  for  her 
we  participate  without  reserve  in  her  predicament. 
The  origin  of  the  infant  is  frankly  ignoble,  whereas  it 
is  on  the  nobleness  of  Giuliana  that  the  story  essen- 
tially hinges;  but  the  contradiction  is  wonderfully  kept 
from  disconcerting  us  altogether.  What  the  author 
has  needed  for  his  strangest  truth  is  that  the  mother 
shall  feel  exactly  as  the  husband  does,  and  that  the 
husband  shall  after  the  first  shock  of  his  horror 
feel  intimately  and  explicitly  with  the  mother.  They 
take  in  this  way  the  same  view  of  their  woeful  ex- 
crescence; and  the  drama  of  the  child's  advent  and  of 
the  first  months  of  his  existence,  his  insistent  and 
hated  survival,  becomes  for  them  in  respect  to  the  rest 
of  the  world  a  drama  of  silence  and  dissimulation,  in 
every  step  of  which  we  feel  a  terror. 

The  effect,  I  may  add,  gains  more  than  one  kind  of 
intensity  from  that  almost  complete  absence  of  other 
contacts  to  which  D'Annunzio  systematically  con- 
demns his  creatures;  introducing  here,  however,  just 
the  two  or  three  that  more  completely  mark  the 
isolation.  It  may  doubtless  be  conceded  that  our 
English-speaking  failure  of  insistence,  of  inquiry  and 
penetration,  in  certain  directions,  springs  partly  from 
our  deep-rooted  habit  of  dealing  with  man,  dramati- 
cally, on  his  social  and  gregarious  side,  as  a  being  the 
variety  of  whose  intercourse  with  his  fellows,  whatever 
forms  his  fellows  may  take,  is  positively  half  his  interest- 
ing motion.  We  fear  to  isolate  him,  for  we  remember 
that  as  we  see  and  know  him  he  scarce  understands 
himself  save  in  action,  action  which  inevitably  mixes 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  265 

him  with  his  kind.  To  see  and  know  him,  like  Signer 
D'Annunzio,  almost  only  in  passion  is  another  matter, 
for  passion  spends  itself  quickly  in  the  open  and  burns 
hot  mainly  in  nooks  and  corners.  Nothing,  too,  in 
the  picture  is  more  striking  than  the  manner  in  which 
the  merely  sentimental  abyss — that  of  the  couple 
brought  together  by  the  thing  that  might  utterly  have 
severed  them — is  consistently  and  successfully  avoided. 
We  should  have  been  certain  to  feel  it  in  many  other 
hands  yawning  but  a  few  steps  off.  We  see  the  dread- 
ful facts  in  themselves,  are  brought  close  to  them  with 
no  interposing  vaguenesses  or  other  beggings  of  the 
question,  and  are  forcibly  reminded  how  much  more 
this  "crudity"  makes  for  the  communication  of  ten- 
derness— what  is  aimed  at — than  an  attitude  conven- 
tionally more  reticent.  We  feel  what  the  tenderness 
can  be  when  it  rests  on  all  the  items  of  a  constituted 
misery,  not  one  of  which  is  illogically  blinked. 

For  the  pangs  and  pities  of  the  flesh  in  especial 
D'Annunzio  has  in  all  his  work  the  finest  hand — those 
of  the  spirit  exist  with  him  indeed  only  as  proceeding 
from  these;  so  that  Giuliana  for  instance  affects  us, 
beyond  any  figure  in  fiction  we  are  likely  to  remember, 
as  living  and  breathing  under  our  touch  and  before 
our  eyes,  as  a  creature  of  organs,  functions  and  proc- 
esses, palpable,  audible,  pitiful  physical  conditions. 
These  are  facts,  many  of  them,  of  an  order  in  pursuit 
of  which  many  a  spectator  of  the  "picture  of  life"  will 
instinctively  desire  to  stop  short,  however  great  in 
general  his  professed  desire  to  enjoy  the  borrowed 
consciousness  that  the  picture  of  life  gives  us;  and 
nothing,  it  may  well  be  said,  is  more  certain  than  that 
we  have  a  right  in  such  matters  to  our  preference,  a 


266  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

right  to  choose  the  kind  of  adventure  of  the  imagina- 
tion we  like  best.  No  obligation  whatever  rests  on 
us  in  respect  to  a  given  kind — much  light  as  our  choice 
may  often  throw  for  the  critic  on  the  nature  of  our  own 
intelligence.  There  at  any  rate,  we  are  disposed  to 
say  of  such  a  piece  of  penetration  as  "LTnnocente," 
there  is  a  particular  dreadful  adventure,  as  large  as 
life,  for  those  who  can  bear  it.  The  conditions  are  all 
present;  it  is  only  the  reader  himself  who  may  break 
down.  When  in  general,  it  may  be  added,  we  see 
readers  do  so,  this  is  truly  more  often  because  they  are 
shocked  at  really  rinding  the  last  consistency  than 
because  they  are  shocked  at  missing  it. 

"II  Trionfo  della  Morte"  and  "II  Fuoco"  stand 
together  as  the  amplest  and  richest  of  our  author's 
histories,  and  the  earlier,  and  more  rounded  and  fault- 
less thing  of  the  two,  is  not  unlikely  to  serve,  I  should 
judge,  as  an  unsurpassable  example  of  his  talent.  His 
accomplishment  here  reaches  its  maximum;  all  his 
powers  fight  for  him;  the  wealth  of  his  expression 
drapes  the  situation  represented  in  a  mantle  of  vo- 
luminous folds,  stiff  with  elaborate  embroidery.  The 
"story"  may  be  told  in  three  words:  how  Giorgio 
Aurispa  meets  in  Rome  the  young  and  extremely  pretty 
wife  of  a  vulgar  man  of  business,  her  unhappiness 
with  whom  is  complete,  and,  falling  in  love  with  her 
on  the  spot,  eventually  persuades  her — after  many 
troubled  passages — to  come  and  pass  a  series  of  weeks 
with  him  in  a  "hermitage"  by  the  summer  sea,  where,  in 
a  delirium  of  free  possession,  he  grows  so  to  hate  her, 
and  to  hate  himself  for  his  subjection  to  her,  and  for 
the  prostration  of  all  honour  and  decency  proceeding 
from  it,  that  his  desire  to  destroy  her  even  at  the  cost 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  267 

of  perishing  with  her  at  last  takes  uncontrollable  form 
and  he  drags  her,  under  a  pretext,  to  the  edge  of  a 
sea-cliff  and  hurls  her,  interlocked  with  him  in  appalled 
resistance,  into  space.  We  get  at  an  early  stage  the 
note  of  that  aridity  of  agitation  in  which  the  narrator 
has  expended  treasures  of  art  in  trying  to  interest  us. 
"Fits  of  indescribable  fury  made  them  try  which  could 
torture  each  other  best,  which  most  lacerate  the  other's 
heart  and  keep  it  in  martyrdom."  But  they  under- 
stand, at  least  the  hero  does;  and  he  formulates  for  his 
companion  the  essence  of  their  impasse.  It  is  not  her 
fault  when  she  tears  and  rends. 

Each  human  soul  carries  in  it  for  love  but  a  determinate  quan- 
tity of  sensitive  force.  It  is  inevitable  that  this  quantity  should 
use  itself  up  with  time,  as  everything  else  does;  so  that  when  it  is 
used  up  no  effort  has  power  to  prevent  love  from  ceasing.  Now  it's 
a  long  time  that  you  have  been  loving  me;  nearly  two  years ! 

The  young  man's  intelligence  is  of  the  clearest;  the 
woman's  here  is  inferior,  though  in  "II  Fuoco"  the  two 
opposed  faculties  are  almost  equal;  but  the  pair  are 
alike  far  from  living  in  their  intelligence,  which  only 
serves  to  bestrew  with  lurid  gleams  the  black  darkness 
of  their  sensual  life.  So  far  as  the  intelligence  is  one 
with  the  will  our  author  fundamentally  treats  it  as  cut 
off  from  all  communication  with  any  other  quarter- 
that  is  with  the  senses  arrayed  and  encamped.  The 
most  his  unfortunates  arrive  at  is  to  carry  their  ex- 
tremely embellished  minds  with  them  through  these 
dusky  passages  as  a  kind  of  gilded  glimmering  lantern, 
the  effect  of  which  is  merely  fantastic  and  ironic — a 
thing  to  make  the  play  of  their  shadows  over  the  walls 
of  their  catacomb  more  monstrous  and  sinister.  Again 
in  the  first  pages  of  "II  Trionfo"  the  glimmer  is  given. 


268  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

He  recognised  the  injustice  of  any  resentment  against  her,  be- 
cause he  recognised  the  fatal  necessities  that  controlled  them  alike. 
No,  his  misery  came  from  no  other  human  creature;  it  came  from 
the  very  essence  of  life.  The  lover  had  not  the  lover  to  complain 
of,  but  simply  love  itself.  Love,  toward  which  his  whole  being 
reached  out,  from  within,  with  a  rush  not  to  be  checked,  love  was 
of  all  the  sad  things  of  this  earth  the  most  lamentably  sad.  And 
to  this  supreme  sadness  he  was  perhaps  condemned  till  death. 

That,  in  a  nutshell,  is  D'Annunzio's  subject-matter; 
not  simply  that  his  characters  see  in  advance  what 
love  is  worth  for  them,  but  that  they  nevertheless  need 
to  make  it  the  totality  of  their  consciousness.  In 
"II  Trionfo"  and  "II  Fuoco"  the  law  just  expressed 
is  put  into  play  at  the  expense  of  the  woman,  with 
the  difference,  however,  that  in  the  latter  tale  the 
woman  perceives  and  judges,  suffers  in  mind,  so  to 
speak,  as  well  as  in  nerves  and  in  temper.  But  it 
would  be  hard  to  say  in  which  of  these  two  produc- 
tions the  inexhaustible  magic  of  Italy  most  helps  the 
effect,  most  hangs  over  the  story  in  such  a  way  as  to 
be  one  with  it  and  to  make  the  ugliness  and  the  beauty 
melt  together.  The  ugliness,  it  is  to  be  noted,  is  con- 
tinually presumed  absent;  the  pursuit  and  cultivation 
of  beauty — that  fruitful  preoccupation  which  above  all, 
I  have  said,  gives  the  author  his  value  as  our  "case"- 
being  the  very  ground  on  which  the  whole  thing  rests. 
The  ugliness  is  an  accident,  a  treachery  of  fate,  the 
intrusion  of  a  foreign  substance — having  for  the  most 
part  in  the  scheme  itself  no  admitted  inevitability. 
Against  it  every  provision  is  made  that  the  most  de- 
veloped taste  in  the  world  can  suggest;  for,  ostensibly, 
transcendently,  Signer  D'Annunzio's  is  the  most  de- 
veloped taste  in  the  world — his  and  that  of  the  fero- 
cious yet  so  contracted  conoscenti  his  heroes,  whose 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  269 

virtual  identity  with  himself,  affirmed  with  a  strangely 
misplaced  complacency  by  some  of  his  critics,  one  would 
surely  hesitate  to  take  for  granted.  It  is  the  won- 
drous physical  and  other  endowments  of  the  two  hero- 
ines of  "II  Piacere."  it  is  the  joy  and  splendour  of  the 
hero's  intercourse  with  them,  to  say  nothing  of  the  lustre 
of  his  own  person,  descent,  talents,  possessions,  and 
of  the  great  general  setting  in  which  everything  is 
offered  us — it  is  all  this  that  makes  up  the  picture, 
with  the  constant  suggestion  that  nothing  of  a  baser 
quality  for  the  esthetic  sense,  or  at  the  worst  for  a  pam- 
pered curiosity,  might  hope  so  much  as  to  live  in  it. 
The  case  is  the  same  in  "L'Innocente,"  a  scene  all 
primarily  smothered  in  flowers  and  fruits  and  fra- 
grances and  soft  Italian  airs,  in  every  implication  of 
flattered  embowered  constantly-renewed  desire,  which 
happens  to  be  a  blighted  felicity  only  for  the  very 
reason  that  the  cultivation  of  delight — in  the  form  of 
the  wife's  luckless  experiment — has  so  awkwardly 
overleaped  itself.  Whatever  furthermore  we  may  re- 
flectively think  either  of  the  Ippolita  of  "II  Trionfo" 
or  of  her  companion's  scheme  of  existence  with  her,  it 
is  enchanting  grace,  strange,  original,  irresistible  in 
kind  and  degree,  that  she  is  given  us  as  representing; 
just  as  her  material  situation  with  her  young  man 
during  the  greater  part  of  the  tale  is  a  constant  com- 
munion, for  both  of  them,  with  the  poetry  and  the 
nobleness  of  classic  landscape,  of  nature  consecrated 
by  association. 

The  mixture  reaches  its  maximum,  however,  in 
"II  Fuoco,"  if  not  perhaps  in  "The  Virgins  of  the 
Rocks";  the  mixture  I  mean  of  every  exhibited  ele- 
ment of  personal  charm,  distinction  and  interest,  with 


27o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

every  insidious  local  influence,  every  glamour  of  place, 
season  and  surrounding  object.  The  heroine  of  the 
first-named  is  a  great  tragic  actress,  exquisite  of 
aspect,  intelligence  and  magnanimity,  exquisite  for 
everything  but  for  being  unfortunately  middle-aged, 
battered,  marked,  as  we  are  constantly  reminded,  by 
all  the  after-sense  of  a  career  of  promiscuous  carnal 
connections.  The  hero  is  a  man  of  letters,  a  poet,  a 
dramatist  of  infinite  reputation  and  resource,  and  their 
union  is  steeped  to  the  eyes  in  the  gorgeous  medium 
of  Venice,  the  moods  of  whose  melancholy  and  the 
voices  of  whose  past  are  an  active  part  of  the  perpet- 
ual concert.  But  we  see  all  the  persons  introduced  to 
us  yearn  and  strain  to  exercise  their  perceptions  and 
taste  their  impressions  as  deeply  as  possible,  conspir- 
ing together  to  interweave  them  with  the  pleasures  of 
passion.  They  "go  in"  as  the  phrase  is,  for  beauty  at 
any  cost — for  each  other's  own  to  begin  with;  their 
creator,  in  the  inspiring  quest,  presses  them  hard,  and 
the  whole  effect  becomes  for  us  that  of  an  organised 
general  sacrifice  to  it  and  an  organised  general  repudia- 
tion of  everything  else.  It  is  not  idle  to  repeat  that 
the  value  of  the  Italian  background  has  to  this  end 
been  inestimable,  and  that  every  spark  of  poetry  it 
had  to  contribute  has  been  struck  from  it — with  what 
supreme  felicity  we  perhaps  most  admiringly  learn 
in  "The  Virgins  of  the  Rocks."  To  measure  the 
assistance  thus  rendered,  and  especially  the  immense 
literary  lift  given,  we  have  only  to  ask  ourselves  what 
appearance  any  one  of  the  situations  presented  would 
have  made  in  almost  any  Cisalpine  or  "northern" 
frame  of  circumstance  whatever.  Supported  but  by 
such  associations  of  local  or  of  literary  elegance  as  our 
comparatively  thin  resources  are  able  to  furnish,  the 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  271 

latent  weakness  in  them  all,  the  rock,  as  to  final  effect, 
on  which  they  split  and  of  which  I  shall  presently 
speak,  would  be  immeasurably  less  dissimulated.  All 
this  is  the  lesson  of  style,  by  which  we  here  catch  a 
writer  in  the  very  act  of  profiting  after  a  curious  double 
fashion.  D'Annunzio  arrives  at  it  both  by  expression 
and  by  material — that  is,  by  a  whole  side  of  the  latter; 
so  that  with  such  energy  at  once  and  such  good  for- 
tune it  would  be  odd  indeed  if  he  had  not  come  far. 
It  is  verily  in  the  very  name  and  interest  of  beauty,  of 
the  lovely  impression,  that  Giorgio  Aurispa  becomes 
homicidal  in  thought  and  finally  in  act. 

She  would  in  death  become  for  me  matter  of  thought,  pure 
ideality.  From  a  precarious  and  imperfect  existence  she  would 
enter  into  an  existence  complete  and  definitive,  forsaking  forever 
the  infirmity  of  her  weak  luxurious  flesh.  Destroy  to  possess — 
there  is  no  other  way  for  him  who  seeks  the  absolute  in  love. 

To  these  reflections  he  has  been  brought  by  the  long, 
dangerous  past  which,  as  the  author  says,  his  connec- 
tion with  his  mistress  has  behind  it — a  past  of  recrim- 
inations of  which  the  ghosts  still  walk.  "It  dragged 
behind  it,  through  time,  an  immense  dark  net,  all  full 
of  dead  things."  To  quote  here  at  all  is  always  to 
desire  to  continue,  and  "II  Trionfo"  abounds  in  the 
illustrative  episodes  that  are  ever  made  so  masterfully 
concrete.  Offering  in  strictness,  incidentally,  the  only 
exhibition  in  all  the  five  volumes  of  a  human  relation 
other  than  the  acutely  sexual,  it  deals  admirably 
enough  with  this  opportunity  when  the  hero  pays  his 
visit  to  his  provincial  parents  before  settling  with  his 
mistress  at  their  hermitage.  His  people  are  of  ancient 
race  and  have  been  much  at  their  ease;  but  the  home 
in  the  old  Apulian  town,  overdarkened  by  the  mis- 


272  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

deeds  of  a  demoralised  father,  is  on  the  verge  of  ruin, 
and  the  dull  mean  despair  of  it  all,  lighted  by  out- 
breaks of  helpless  rage  on  the  part  of  the  injured  mother, 
is  more  than  the  visitor  can  bear,  absorbed  as  he  is  in 
impatiences  and  concupiscences  which  make  every- 
thing else  cease  to  exist  for  him.  His  terror  of  the 
place  and  its  troubles  but  exposes  of  course  the  abjec- 
tion of  his  weakness,  and  the  sordid  squabbles,  the 
general  misery  and  mediocrity  of  life  that  he  has  to 
face,  constitute  precisely,  for  his  personal  design,  the 
abhorred  challenge  of  ugliness,  the  interference  of  a 
call  other  than  erotic.  He  flees  before  it,  leaving  it  to 
make  shift  as  it  can;  but  nothing  could  be  more  "ren- 
dered" in  detail  than  his  overwhelmed  vision  of  it. 

So  with  the  other  finest  passages  of  the  story,  no- 
tably the  summer  day  spent  by  the  lovers  in  a  long 
dusty  dreadful  pilgrimage  to  a  famous  local  miracle- 
working  shrine,  where  they  mingle  with  the  multitude 
of  the  stricken,  the  deformed,  the  hideous,  the  barely 
human,  and  from  which  they  return,  disgusted  and 
appalled,  to  plunge  deeper  into  consoling  but  too  tem- 
porary transports;  notably  also  the  incident,  masterly 
in  every  touch,  of  the  little  drowned  contadino,  the 
whole  scene  of  the  small  starved  dead  child  on  the 
beach,  in  all  the  beauty  of  light  and  air  and  view,  with 
the  effusions  and  vociferations  and  grimnesses  round 
him,  the  sights  and  sounds  of  the  quasi-barbaric  life 
that  have  the  relief  of  antique  rites  portrayed  on  old 
tombs  and  urns,  that  quality  and  dignity  of  looming 
larger  which  a  great  feeling  on  the  painter's  part  ever 
gives  to  small  things.  With  this  ampler  truth  the  last 
page  of  the  book  is  above  all  invested,  the  description 
of  the  supreme  moment — for  some  time  previous  creep- 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  273 

ing  nearer  and  nearer — at  which  the  delirious  protag- 
onist beguiles  his  vaguely  but  not  fully  suspicious 
companion  into  coming  out  with  him  toward  the  edge 
of  a  dizzy  place  over  the  sea,  where  he  suddenly  grasps 
her  for  her  doom  and  the  sense  of  his  awful  intention, 
flashing  a  light  back  as  into  their  monstrous  past, 
makes  her  shriek  for  her  life.  She  dodges  him  at  the 
first  betrayal,  panting  and  trembling. 

"Are  you  crazy  ?"  she  cried  with  wrath  in  her  throat.  "Are  you 
crazy  ?"  But  as  she  saw  him  make  for  her  afresh  in  silence,  as  she 
felt  herself  seized  with  still  harsher  violence  and  dragged  afresh 
toward  her  danger,  she  understood  it  all  in  a  great  sinister  flash 
which  blasted  her  soul  with  terror.  "No,  no,  Giorgio!  Let  me 
go  !  Let  me  go  !  Another  minute — listen,  listen  !  Just  a  minute  ! 

I  want  to  say ! "     She  supplicated,  mad  with  terror,  getting 

herself  free  and  hoping  to  make  him  wait,  to  put  him  off  with  pity. 
"A  minute!  Listen!  I  love  you!  Forgive  me!  Forgive  me!" 
She  stammered  incoherent  words,  desperate,  feeling  herself  over- 
come, losing  her  ground,  seeing  death  close.  "Murder!"  she  then 
yelled  in  her  fury.  And  she  defended  herself  with  her  nails,  with 
her  teeth,  biting  like  a  wild  beast.  "Murder!"  she  yelled,  feeling 
herself  seized  by  the  hair,  felled  to  the  ground  on  the  edge  of  the 
precipice,  lost.  The  dog  meanwhile  barked  out  at  the  scuffle. 
The  struggle  was  short  and  ferocious,  as  between  implacable  ene- 
mies who  had  been  nursing  to  this  hour  in  the  depths  of  their  souls 
an  intensity  of  hate.  And  they  plunged  into  death  locked  together. 

The  wonder-working  shrine  of  the  Abruzzi,  to  which 
they  have  previously  made  their  way,  is  a  local  Lourdes, 
the  resort  from  far  and  wide  of  the  physically  afflicted, 
the  evocation  of  whose  multitudinous  presence,  the 
description  of  whose  unimaginable  miseries  and  ec- 
stasies, grovelling  struggles  and  supplications,  has  the 
mark  of  a  pictorial  energy  for  such  matters  not  in- 
ferior to  that  of  £mile  Zola — to  the  degree  even  that 
the  originality  of  the  pages  in  question  was,  if  I  re- 


274  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

member  rightly,  rather  sharply  impugned  in  Paris. 
D'Annunzio's  defence,  however,  was  easy,  residing 
as  it  does  in  the  fact  that  to  handle  any  subject  suc- 
cessfully handled  by  Zola  (his  failures  are  another 
matter)  is  quite  inevitably  to  walk  more  or  less  in  his 
footsteps,  in  prints  so  wide  and  deep  as  to  leave  little 
margin  for  passing  round  them.  To  which  I  may 
add  that,  though  the  judgment  may  appear  odd,  the 
truth  and  force  of  the  young  man's  few  abject  days  at 
Guardiagrele,  his  casa  paterna,  are  such  as  to  make 
us  wish  that  other  such  corners  of  life  were  more  fre- 
quent in  the  author's  pages.  He  has  the  supremely 
interesting  quality  in  the  novelist  that  he  fixes,  as  it 
were,  the  tone  of  every  cluster  of  objects  he  approaches, 
fixes  it  by  the  consistency  and  intensity  of  his  repro- 
duction. In  "The  Virgins  of  the  Rocks"  we  have  also 
a  casa  paterna,  and  a  thing,  as  I  have  indicated,  of 
exquisite  and  wonderful  tone;  but  the  tone  here  is  of 
poetry,  the  truth  and  the  force  are  less  measurable 
and  less  familiar,  and  the  whole  question,  after  all, 
in  its  refined  and  attenuated  form,  is  still  that  of 
sexual  pursuit,  which  keeps  it  within  the  writer's  too 
frequent  limits.  Giorgio  Aurispa,  in  "II  Trionfo," 
lives  in  communion  with  the  spirit  of  an  amiable  and 
melancholy  uncle  who  had  committed  suicide  and 
made  him  the  heir  of  his  fortune,  and  one  of  the 
nephew's  most  frequent  and  faithful  loyalties  is  to 
hark  back,  in  thought,  to  the  horror  of  his  first  knowl- 
edge of  the  dead  man's  act,  put  before  us  always  with 
its  accompaniment  of  loud  southern  resonance  and 
confusion.  He  is  in  the  place  again,  he  is  in  the  room, 
at  Guardiagrele,  of  the  original  appalled  vision. 

He  heard,  in  the  stillness  of  the  air  and  of  his  arrested  soul,  the 
small  shrill  of  an  insect  in  the  wainscot.     And  the  little  fact  sufficed 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  275 

to  dissipate  for  the  moment  the  extreme  violence  of  his  nervous 
tension,  as  the  puncture  of  a  needle  suffices  to  empty  a  swollen 
bladder.  Every  particular  of  the  terrible  day  came  back  to  his 
memory:  the  news  abruptly  brought  to  Torretta  di  Sarsa,  toward 
three  in  the  afternoon,  by  a  panting  messenger  who  stammered 
and  whimpered;  the  ride  on  horseback,  at  lightning  speed,  under 
the  canicular  sky  and  up  the  torrid  slopes,  and,  during  the  rush, 
the  sudden  faintnesses  that  turned  him  dizzy  in  his  saddle;  then  the 
house  at  home,  filled  with  sobs,  filled  with  a  noise  of  doors  slamming 
in  the  general  scare,  filled  with  the  strumming  of  his  own  arteries; 
and  at  last  his  irruption  into  the  room,  the  sight  of  the  corpse,  the 
curtains  inflated  and  rustling,  the  tinkle  on  the  wall  of  the  little 
font  for  holy  water. 

This  young  man's  great  mistake,  we  are  told,  had 
been  his  insistence  on  regarding  love  as  a  form  of  en- 
joyment. He  would  have  been  in  a  possible  relation 
to  it  only  if  he  had  learned  to  deal  with  it  as  a  form  of 
suffering.  This  is  the  lesson  brought  home  to  the 
heroine  of  "II  Fuoco,"  who  suffers  indeed,  as  it  seems 
to  us,  so  much  more  than  is  involved  in  the  occasion. 
We  ask  ourselves  continually  why;  that  is  we  do  so  at 
first;  we  do  so  before  the  special  force  of  the  book  takes 
us  captive  and  reduces  us  to  mere  charmed  absorption 
of  its  successive  parts  and  indifference  to  its  moral 
sense.  Its  defect  is  verily  that  it  has  no  moral  sense 
proportionate  to  the  truth,  the  constant  high  style 
of  the  general  picture;  and  this  fact  makes  the  whole 
thing  appear  given  us  simply  because  it  has  happened, 
because  it  was  material  that  the  author  had  become 
possessed  of,  and  not  because,  in  its  almost  journalistic 
"actuality,"  it  has  any  large  meaning.  We  get  the  im- 
pression of  a  direct  transfer,  a  "lift,"  bodily,  of  some- 
thing seen  and  known,  something  not  really  produced 
by  the  chemical  process  of  art,  the  crucible  or  retort 
from  which  things  emerge  for  a  new  function.  Their 


276  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

meaning  here  at  any  rate,  extracted  with  difficulty, 
would  seem  to  be  that  there  is  an  inevitable  leak  of 
ease  and  peace  when  a  mistress  happens  to  be  con- 
siderably older  than  her  lover;  but  even  this  interesting 
yet  not  unfamiliar  truth  loses  itself  in  the  great  poetic, 
pathetic,  psychologic  ceremonial. 

That  matters  little  indeed,  as  I  say,  while  we  read; 
the  two  sensibilities  concerned  bloom,  in  all  the  Vene- 
tian glow,  like  wondrous  water-plants,  throwing  out 
branches  and  flowers  of  which  we  admire  the  fantastic 
growth  even  while  we  remain,  botanically  speaking,  be- 
wildered. They  are  other  sensibilities  than  those 
with  which  we  ourselves  have  community — one  of  the 
main  reasons  of  their  appearing  so  I  shall  presently  ex- 
plain; and,  besides,  they  are  isolated,  sequestrated,  ac- 
cording to  D'Annunzio's  constant  view  of  such  cases, 
for  an  exclusive,  an  intensified  and  arid  development. 
The  mistress  has,  abnormally,  none  of  the  protection, 
the  alternative  life,  the  saving  sanity  of  other  inter- 
ests, ties,  employments;  while  the  hero,  a  young  poet 
and  dramatist  with  an  immense  consciousness  of 
genius  and  fame,  has  for  the  time  at  least  only  those 
poor  contacts  with  existence  that  the  last  intimacies 
of  his  contact  with  his  friend's  person,  her  poor  corpo 
non  piu  giovane,  as  he  so  frequently  repeats,  represent 
for  him.  It  is  not  for  us,  however,  to  contest  the 
relation;  it  is  in  the  penetrating  way  again  in  which 
the  relation  is  rendered  that  the  writer  has  his  triumph; 
the  way  above  all  in  which  the  world-weary  interest- 
ing sensitive  woman,  with  her  infinite  intelligence,  yet 
with  her  longing  for  some  happiness  still  among  all  her 
experiments  untasted,  and  her  genius  at  the  same  time 
for  familiar  misery,  is  marked,  featured,  individualised 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  277 

for  us,  and,  with  the  strangest  art  in  the  world — one 
of  those  mysteries  of  which  great  talents  alone  have 
the  trick — at  once  ennobled  with  beauty  and  dese- 
crated by  a  process  that  we  somehow  feel  to  be  that  of 
exposure,  to  spring  from  some  violation  of  a  privilege. 
"  'Do  with  me,'  "  says  the  Foscarina  on  a  certain  oc- 
casion, "  'whatever  you  will';  and  she  smiled  in  her 
offered  abjection.  She  belonged  to  him  like  the  thing 
one  holds  in  one's  fist,  like  the  ring  on  one's  finger, 
like  a  glove,  like  a  garment,  like  a  word  that  may  be 
spoken  or  not,  like  a  draught  that  may  be  drunk  or 
poured  on  the  ground."  There  are  some  lines  describ- 
ing an  hour  in  which  she  has  made  him  feel  as  never 
before  "the  incalculable  capacity  of  the  heart  of  man. 
And  it  seemed  to  him  as  he  heard  the  beating  of  his 
own  heart  and  divined  the  violence  of  the  other  be- 
side him  that  he  had  in  his  ears  the  loud  repercussion 
of  the  hammer  on  the  hard  anvil  where  human  destiny 
is  forged."  More  than  ever  here  the  pitch  of  the 
personal  drama  is  taken  up  by  everything  else  in  the 
scene — everything  else  being  in  fact  but  the  immediate 
presence  of  Venice,  her  old  faded  colour  and  old  vague 
harmonies,  played  with  constantly  as  we  might  play 
with  some  rosy  fretted  faintly-sounding  sea-shell. 

It  would  take  time  to  say  what  we  play  with  in  the 
silver-toned  "Virgins  of  the  Rocks,"  the  history  of  a 
visit  paid  by  a  transcendent  young  man — always  pretty 
much  the  same  young  man — to  an  illustrious  family 
whose  fortunes  have  tragically  shrunken  with  the  ex- 
pulsion of  the  Bourbons  from  the  kingdom  of  Naples, 
and  the  three  last  lovely  daughters  of  whose  house 
are  beginning  to  wither  on  the  stem,  undiscovered,  un- 
sought, in  a  dilapidated  old  palace,  an  old  garden  of 


278  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

neglected  pomp,  a  place  of  fountains  and  colonnades, 
marble  steps  and  statues,  all  circled  with  hard  bright 
sun-scorched  volcanic  scenery.  They  are  tacitly  can- 
didates for  the  honour  of  the  hero's  hand,  and  the  sub- 
ject of  the  little  tale,  which  deals  with  scarce  more  than 
a  few  summer  days,  is  the  manner  of  their  presenting 
themselves  for  his  admiration  and  his  choice.  I  de- 
cidedly name  this  exquisite  composition  as  my  pre- 
ferred of  the  series;  for  if  its  tone  is  thoroughly  romantic 
the  romance  is  yet  of  the  happiest  kind,  the  kind  that 
consists  in  the  imaginative  development  of  observable 
things,  things  present,  significant,  related  to  us,  and 
not  in  a  weak  false  fumble  for  the  remote  and  the  dis- 
connected. 

It  is  indeed  the  romantic  mind  itself  that  makes  the 
picture,  and  there  could  be  no  better  case  of  the  abso- 
lute artistic  vision.  The  mere  facts  are  soon  said;  the 
main  fact,  above  all,  of  the  feeble  remnant  of  an  ex- 
hausted race  waiting  in  impotence  to  see  itself  cease 
to  be.  The  father  has  nothing  personal  left  but  the 
ruins  of  his  fine  presence  and  of  his  old  superstitions, 
a  handful  of  silver  dust;  the  mother,  mad  and  under 
supervision,  stalks  about  with  the  delusion  of  imperial 
greatness  (there  is  a  wonderful  page  on  her  parading 
through  the  gardens  in  her  rococo  palanquin,  like  a 
Byzantine  empress,  attended  by  sordid  keepers,  while 
the  others  are  hushed  into  pity  and  awe);  the  two  sons, 
hereditarily  tainted,  are  virtually  imbecile;  the  three 
daughters,  candidly  considered,  are  what  we  should 
regard  in  our  Anglo-Saxon  world  as  but  the  stuff  of 
rather  particularly  dreary  and  shabby,  quite  unutter- 
ably idle  old  maids.  Nothing,  within  the  picture, 
occurs;  nothing  is  done  or,  more  acutely  than  usual, 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  279 

than  everywhere,  suffered;  it  is  all  a  mere  affair  of 
the  rich  impression,  the  complexity  of  images  projected 
upon  the  quintessential  spirit  of  the  hero,  whose  own 
report  is  what  we  have — an  affair  of  the  quality  of 
observation,  sentiment  and  eloquence  brought  to  bear. 
It  is  not  too  much  to  say  even  that  the  whole  thing 
is  in  the  largest  sense  but  a  theme  for  style,  style  of 
substance  as  well  as  of  form.  Within  this  compass  it 
blooms  and  quivers  and  shimmers  with  light,  becomes 
a  wonderful  little  walled  garden  of  romance.  The 
young  man  has  a  passage  of  extreme  but  respectful 
tenderness  with  each  of  the  sisters  in  turn,  and  the 
general  cumulative  effect  is  scarcely  impaired  by  the 
fact  that  "nothing  comes"  of  any  of  these  relations. 
Too  little  comes  of  anything,  I  think,  for  any  very 
marked  human  analogy,  inasmuch  as  if  it  is  interesting 
to  be  puzzled  to  a  certain  extent  by  what  an  action, 
placed  before  us,  is  designed  to  show  or  to  signify,  so 
we  require  for  this  refined  amusement  at  least  the  sense 
that  some  general  idea  is  represented.  We  must  feel 
it  present. 

Therefore  if  making  out  nothing  very  distinct  in  "Le 
Vergini"  but  the  pictorial  idea,  and  yet  cleaving  to 
the  preference  I  have  expressed,  I  let  the  anomaly  pass 
as  a  tribute  extorted  by  literary  art,  I  may  seem  to 
imply  that  a  book  may  have  a  great  interest  without 
showing  a  perfect  sense.  The  truth  is  undoubtedly 
that  I  am  in  some  degree  beguiled  and  bribed  by  the 
particularly  intense  expression  given  in  these  pages  to 
the  author's  esthetic  faith.  If  he  is  so  supremely  a 
"case"  it  is  because  this  production  has  so  much  to 
say  for  it,  and  says  it  with  such  a  pride  of  confidence, 
with  an  assurance  and  an  elegance  that  fairly  make  it 


28o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

the  last  conceivable  word  of  such  a  profession.  The 
observations  recorded  have  their  origin  in  the  nar- 
rator's passionate  reaction  against  the  vulgarity  of  the 
day.  All  the  writer's  young  men  react;  but  Cantelmo, 
in  the  volume  before  us,  reacts  with  the  finest  con- 
tempt. He  is,  like  his  brothers,  a  raffine  conservative, 
believing  really,  so  far  as  we  understand  it,  only  in 
the  virtue  of  "race"  and  in  the  grand  manner.  The 
blighted  Virgins,  with  all  that  surrounds  them,  are  an 
affirmation  of  the  grand  manner — that  is  of  the  shame 
and  scandal  of  what  in  an  odious  age  it  has  been  re- 
duced to.  It  consists  indeed  of  a  number  of  different 
things  which  I  may  not  pretend  to  have  completely 
fitted  together,  but  which  are,  with  other  elements,  the 
sense  of  the  supremacy  of  beauty,  the  supremacy  of 
style  and,  last  not  least,  of  the  personal  will,  mani- 
fested for  the  most  part  as  a  cold  insolence  of  attitude 
— not  manifested  as  anything  much  more  edifying. 
What  it  really  appears  to  come  to  is  that  the  will  is 
a  sort  of  romantic  ornament,  the  application  of  which, 
for  life  in  the  present  and  the  future,  remains  awk- 
wardly vague,  though  we  are  always  to  remember  that 
it  has  been  splendidly  forged  in  the  past.  The  will  in 
short  is  beauty,  is  style,  is  elegance,  is  art — especially 
in  members  of  great  families  and  possessors  of  large 
fortunes.  That  of  the  hero  of  "Le  Vergini"  has  been 
handed  down  to  him  direct,  as  by  a  series  of  testamen- 
tary provisions,  from  a  splendid  young  ancestor  for 
whose  memory  and  whose  portrait  he  has  a  worship, 
a  warrior  and  virtuoso  of  the  Renaissance,  the  model 
of  his  spirit. 

He  represents  for  me  the  mysterious  meaning  of  the  power  of 
style,  not  violable  by  any  one,  and  least  of  all  ever  by  myself  in 
my  own  person. 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  281 

And  elsewhere: — 

The  sublime  hands  of  Violante  [the  beauty  and  interest  of  hands 
play  a  great  part,  in  general,  in  the  picture],  pressing  out  in  drops 
the  essence  of  the  tender  flowers  and  letting  them  fall  bruised  to 
the  ground,  performed  an  act  which,  as  a  symbol,  corresponded 
perfectly  to  the  character  of  my  style;  this  being  ever  to  extract 
from  a  thing  its  very  last  scent  of  life,  to  take  from  it  all  it  could 
give  and  leave  it  exhausted.  Was  not  this  one  of  the  most  im- 
portant offices  of  my  art  of  life  ? 

The  book  is  a  singularly  rich  exhibition  of  an  inward 
state,  the  state  of  private  poetic  intercourse  with  things, 
the  kind  of  current  that  in  a  given  personal  experience 
flows  to  and  fro  between  the  imagination  and  the  world. 
It  represents  the  esthetic  consciousness,  proud  of  its 
conquests  and  discoveries,  and  yet  trying,  after  all,  as 
with  the  vexed  sense  of  a  want,  to  look  through  other 
windows  and  eyes.  It  goes  all  lengths,  as  is  of  course 
indispensable  on  behalf  of  a  personage  constituting  a 
case.  "I  firmly  believe  that  the  greatest  sum  of  future 
dominion  will  be  precisely  that  which  shall  have  its 
base  and  its  apex  in  Rome" — such  being  in  our  person- 
age the  confidence  of  the  "Latin"  spirit.  Does  it  not 
really  all  come  back  to  style  ?  It  was  to  the  Latin 
spirit  that  the  Renaissance  was  primarily  vouchsafed; 
and  was  not,  for  a  simplified  statement,  the  last  word 
of  the  Renaissance  the  question  of  taste  ?  That  is  the 
esthetic  question;  and  when  the  Latin  spirit  after  many 
misadventures  again  clears  itself  we  shall  see  how  all 
the  while  this  treasure  has  been  in  its  keeping.  Let  us 
as  frankly  as  possible  add  that  there  is  a  whole  side  on 
which  the  clearance  may  appear  to  have  made  quite  a 
splendid  advance  with  Signer  D'Annunzio  himself. 

But  there  is  another  side,  which  I  have  been  too  long 
in  coming  to,  yet  which  I  confess  is  for  me  much  the 


282  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

more  interesting.  No  account  of  our  author  is  com- 
plete unless  we  really  make  out  what  becomes  of  that 
esthetic  consistency  in  him  which,  as  I  have  said,  our 
own  collective  and  cultivated  effort  is  so  earnestly  at- 
tempting and  yet  so  pathetically,  if  not  so  grotesquely, 
missing.  We  are  struck,  unmistakably,  early  in  our 
acquaintance  with  these  productions,  by  the  fact  that 
their  total  beauty  somehow  extraordinarily  fails  to 
march  with  their  beauty  of  parts,  and  that  something 
is  all  the  while  at  work  undermining  that  bulwark 
against  ugliness  which  it  is  their  obvious  theory  of  their 
own  office  to  throw  up.  The  disparity  troubles  and 
haunts  us  just  in  proportion  as  we  admire;  and  our 
uneasy  wonderment  over  the  source  of  the  weakness 
fails  to  spoil  our  pleasure  only  because  such  questions 
have  so  lively  an  interest  for  the  critic.  We  feel  our- 
selves somehow  in  presence  of  a  singular  incessant  leak 
in  the  effect  of  distinction  so  artfully  and  copiously 
produced,  and  we  apply  our  test  up  and  down  in  the 
manner  of  the  inquiring  person  who,  with  a  tin  imple- 
ment and  a  small  flame,  searches  our  premises  for  an 
escape  of  gas.  The  bad  smell  has,  as  it  were,  to  be 
accounted  for;  and  yet  where,  amid  the  roses  and 
lilies  and  pomegranates,  the  thousand  essences  and  fra- 
grances, can  such  a  thing  possibly  be  ?  Quite  abruptly, 
I  think,  at  last  (if  we  have  been  much  under  the  spell) 
our  test  gives  us  the  news,  not  unaccompanied  with 
the  shock  with  which  we  see  our  escape  of  gas  spring 
into  flame.  There  is  no  mistaking  it;  the  leak  of  dis- 
tinction is  produced  by  a  positive  element  of  the  vul- 
gar; and  that  the  vulgar  should  flourish  in  an  air  so 
charged,  intellectually  speaking,  with  the  "aristocratic" 
element,  becomes  for  us  straightway  the  greatest  of 
oddities  and  at  the  same  time,  critically  speaking,  one 
of  the  most  interesting  things  conceivable. 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  283 

The  interest  then  springs  from  its  being  involved  for 
us  in  the  "case."  We  recognise  so  many  suggested 
consequences  if  the  case  is  really  to  prove  responsible 
for  it.  We  ask  ourselves  if  there  be  not  a  connection, 
we  almost  tremble  lest  there  shouldn't  be;  since  what 
is  more  obvious  than  that,  if  a  high  example  of  exclu- 
sive estheticism — as  high  a  one  as  we  are  likely  ever 
to  meet — is  bound  sooner  or  later  to  spring  a  leak,  the 
general  question  receives  much  light  ?  We  recognise 
here  the  value  of  our  author's  complete  consistency: 
he  would  have  kept  his  bottom  sound,  so  to  speak, 
had  he  not  remained  so  long  at  sea.  If  those  imper- 
fect exponents  of  his  faith  whom  we  have  noted  among 
ourselves  fail  to  flower,  for  a  climax,  in  any  proportion- 
ate way,  we  make  out  that  they  are  embarrassed  not 
so  much  by  any  force  they  possess  as  by  a  force — a 
force  of  temperament — that  they  lack.  The  anomaly 
I  speak  of  presents  itself  thus  as  the  dilemma  in  which 
Signor  D'Annunzio's  consistency  has  inexorably  landed 
him;  and  the  disfigurement  breaks  out,  strikingly 
enough,  in  the  very  forefront  of  his  picture,  at  the 
point  where  he  has  most  lavished  his  colour.  It  is 
where  he  has  most  trusted  and  depended  that  he  is 
most  betrayed,  the  traitor  sharing  certainly  his  tent 
and  his  confidence.  What  is  it  that  in  the  interest  of 
beauty  he  most  elaborately  builds  on  if  not  on  the  love- 
affairs  of  his  heroes  and  heroines,  if  not  on  his  exhibi- 
tion of  the  free  play,  the  sincere  play,  the  play  closely 
studied  and  frankly  represented,  of  the  sexual  relation  ? 
It  is  round  this  exercise,  for  him,  that  expressible, 
demonstrable,  communicable  beauty  prevailingly  clus- 
ters; a  view  indeed  as  to  which  we  all  generously  go 
with  him,  subject  to  the  reserve  for  each  of  us  of  our 
own  expression  and  demonstration.  It  is  these  things 


284  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

on  his  part  that  break  down,  it  is  his  discrimination 
that  falls  short,  and  thereby  the  very  kind  of  intel- 
lectual authority  most  implied  by  his  pretension. 
There  is  according  to  him  an  immense  amenity  that 
can  be  saved — saved  by  style — from  the  general  wreck 
and  welter  of  what  is  most  precious,  from  the  bank- 
ruptcy determined  more  and  more  by  our  basely  demo- 
cratic conditions.  As  we  watch  the  actual  process, 
however,  it  is  only  to  see  the  lifeboat  itself  founder. 
The  vulgarity  into  which  he  so  incongruously  drops  is, 
I  will  not  say  the  space  he  allots  to  love-affairs,  but 
the  weakness  of  his  sense  of  "values"  in  depicting 
them. 

We  begin  to  ask  ourselves  at  an  early  stage  what 
this  queer  passion  may  be  in  the  representation  of 
which  the  sense  of  beauty  ostensibly  finds  its  richest 
expression  and  which  is  yet  attended  by  nothing  else 
at  all — neither  duration,  nor  propagation,  nor  common 
kindness,  nor  common  consistency  with  other  relations, 
common  congruity  with  the  rest  of  life — to  make  its 
importance  good.  If  beauty  is  the  supreme  need  so 
let  it  be;  nothing  is  more  certain  than  that  we  can 
never  get  too  much  of  it  if  only  we  get  it  of  the  right 
sort.  It  is  therefore  on  this  very  ground — the  ground 
of  its  own  sufficiency — that  Signor  D'Annunzio's  in- 
vocation of  it  collapses  at  our  challenge.  The  vul- 
garity comes  from  the  disorder  really  introduced  into 
values,  as  I  have  called  them;  from  the  vitiation  suf- 
fered— that  we  should  have  to  record  so  mean  an  acci- 
dent— by  taste,  impeccable  taste,  itself.  The  truth  of 
this  would  come  out  fully  in  copious  examples,  now 
impossible;  but  it  is  not  too  much  to  say,  I  think, 
that  in  every  principal  situation  presented  the  funda- 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  285 

mental  weakness  causes  the  particular  interest  to  be 
inordinately  compromised. 

I  must  not,  I  know,  make  too  much  of  "II  Piacere" 
— one  of  those  works  of  promising  youth  with  which 
criticism  is  always  easy — and  I  should  indeed  say 
nothing  of  it  if  it  were  also  a  work  of  less  ability.  It 
really,  however,  to  my  mind,  quite  gives  us  the  key, 
all  in  the  morning  early,  to  our  author's  general  mis- 
adventure. Andrea  Sperelli  is  the  key;  Donna  Maria 
is  another  key  of  a  slightly  different  shape.  They  have 
neither  of  them  the  esthetic  importance,  any  more 
than  the  moral,  that  their  narrator  claims  for  them 
and  in  his  elaborate  insistence  on  which  he  has  so 
hopelessly  lost  his  way.  If  they  were  important — by 
which  I  mean  if  they  showed  in  any  other  light  than 
that  of  their  particular  erotic  exercise — they  would  jus- 
tify the  claim  made  for  them  with  such  superior  art. 
They  have  no  general  history,  since  their  history  is 
only,  and  immediately  and  extravagantly,  that  of  their 
too  cheap  and  too  easy  romance.  Why  should  the  ca- 
reer of  the  young  man  be  offered  as  a  sample  of  pathetic, 
of  tragic,  of  edifying  corruption  ? — in  which  case  it 
might  indeed  be  matter  for  earnest  exhibition.  The 
march  of  corruption,  the  insidious  influence  of  pro- 
pinquity, opportunity,  example,  the  ravage  of  false  es- 
timates and  the  drama  of  sterilising  passion — all  this 
is  a  thinkable  theme,  thinkable  especially  in  the  light 
of  a  great  talent.  But  for  Andrea  Sperelli  there  is  not 
only  no  march,  no  drama,  there  is  not  even  a  weak- 
ness to  give  him  the  semblance  of  dramatic,  of  plastic 
material;  he  is  solidly,  invariably,  vulgarly  strong,  and 
not  a  bit  more  corrupt  at  the  end  of  his  disorders  than 
at  the  beginning.  His  erudition,  his  intellectual  ac- 


286  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

complishments  and  elevation,  are  too  easily  spoken  for; 
no  view  of  him  is  given  in  which  we  can  feel  or  taste 
them.  Donna  Maria  is  scarcely  less  signal  an  instance 
of  the  apparent  desire  on  the  author's  part  to  impute 
a  "value"  defeated  by  his  apparently  not  knowing 
what  a  value  is.  She  is  apparently  an  immense  value 
for  the  occasions  on  which  the  couple  secretly  meet, 
but  how  is  she  otherwise  one  ?  and  what  becomes 
therefore  of  the  beauty,  the  interest,  the  pathos,  the 
struggle,  or  whatever  else,  of  her  relation — relation  of 
character,  of  judgment,  even  of  mere  taste — to  her 
own  collapse  ?  The  immediate  physical  sensibility  that 
surrenders  in  her  is,  as  throughout,  exquisitely  painted; 
but  since  nothing  operates  for  her,  one  way  or  the 
other,  but  that  familiar  faculty,  we  are  left  casting 
about  us  almost  as  much  for  what  else  she  has  to  give 
as  for  what,  in  any  case,  she  may  wish  to  keep. 

The  author's  view  of  the  whole  matter  of  durations 
and  dates,  in  these  connections,  gives  the  scale  of 
"distinction"  by  itself  a  marked  downward  tilt;  it 
confounds  all  differences  between  the  trivial  and  the 
grave.  Giuliana,  in  "LTnnocente,"  is  interesting  be- 
cause she  has  had  a  misadventure,  and  she  is  exquisite 
in  her  delineator's  view  because  she  has  repented  of 
it.  But  the  misadventure,  it  appears,  was  a  matter 
but  of  a  minute;  so  that  we  oddly  see  this  particular 
romance  attenuated  on  the  ground  of  its  brevity. 
Given  the  claims  of  the  exquisite,  the  attenuation 
should  surely  be  sought  in  the  very  opposite  quarter; 
since,  where  these  remarkable  affections  are  concerned, 
how  otherwise  than  by  the  element  of  comparative 
duration  do  we  obtain  the  element  of  comparative 
good  faith,  on  which  we  depend  for  the  element,  in 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  287 

turn,  of  comparative  dignity  ?  Andrea  Sperelli  be- 
comes in  the  course  of  a  few  weeks  in  Rome  the  lover 
of  some  twenty  or  thirty  women  of  fashion — the  num- 
ber scarce  matters;  but  to  make  this  possible  his  con- 
nection with  each  has  but  to  last  a  day  or  two;  and 
the  effect  of  that  in  its  order  is  to  reduce  to  nothing, 
by  vulgarity,  by  frank  grotesqueness  of  association, 
the  romantic  capacity  in  him  on  which  his  chronicler's 
whole  appeal  to  us  is  based.  The  association  rising 
before  us  more  nearly  than  any  other  is  that  of  the 
manners  observable  in  the  most  mimetic  department 
of  any  great  menagerie. 

The  most  serious  relation  depicted — in  the  sense  of 
being  in  some  degree  the  least  suggestive  of  mere  zo- 
ological sociability — is  that  of  the  lovers  in  "II  Fuoco," 
as  we  also  take  this  pair  for  their  creator's  sanest  and 
most  responsible  spirits.  It  is  a  question  between 
them  of  an  heroic  affection,  and  yet  the  affection  ap- 
pears to  make  good  for  itself  no  place  worth  speaking 
of  in  their  lives.  It  holds  but  for  a  scant  few  weeks; 
the  autumn  already  reigns  when  the  connection  begins, 
and  the  connection  is  played  out  (or  if  it  be  not  the 
ado  is  about  nothing)  with  the  first  flush  of  the  early 
Italian  spring.  It  suddenly,  on  our  hands,  becomes 
trivial,  with  all  our  own  estimate  of  reasons  and  reali- 
ties and  congruities  falsified.  The  Foscarina  has,  on 
professional  business,  to  "go  away,"  and  the  young 
poet  has  to  do  the  same;  but  such  a  separation,  so 
easily  bridged  over  by  such  great  people,  makes  a  beg- 
garly climax  for  an  intercourse  on  behalf  of  which  all 
the  forces  of  poetry  and  tragedy  have  been  set  in  mo- 
tion. Where  then  we  ask  ourselves  is  the  weakness  ? 
— as  we  ask  it,  very  much  in  the  same  way,  in  respect 


288  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  the  vulgarised  aspect  of  the  tragedy  of  Giorgio  Au- 
rispa.  The  pang  of  pity,  the  pang  that  springs  from 
a  conceivable  community  in  doom,  is  in  this  latter  case 
altogether  wanting.  Directly  we  lift  a  little  the  em- 
broidered mantle  of  that  gift  for  appearances  which 
plays,  on  Signor  D'Annunzio's  part,  such  tricks  upon 
us,  we  find  ourselves  put  off,  as  the  phrase  is,  with  an 
inferior  article.  The  inferior  article  is  the  hero's  pov- 
erty of  life,  which  cuts  him  down  for  pathetic  interest 
just  as  the  same  limitation  in  "II  Piacere"  cuts  down 
Donna  Maria.  Presented  each  as  victims  of  another 
rapacious  person  who  has  got  the  better  of  them,  there 
is  no  process,  no  complexity,  no  suspense  in  their 
story;  and  thereby,  we  submit,  there  is  no  esthetic 
beauty.  Why  shouldn't  Giorgio  Aurispa  go  mad  ? 
Why  shouldn't  Stelio  Effrena  go  away  ?  We  make  the 
inquiry  as  disconcerted  spectators,  not  feeling  in  the 
former  case  that  we  have  had  any  communication  with 
the  wretched  youth's  sanity,  and  not  seeing  in  the  lat- 
ter why  the  tie  of  all  the  passion  that  has  been  made 
so  admirably  vivid  for  us  should  not  be  able  to  weather 
change. 

Nothing  is  so  singular  with  D'Annunzio  as  that  the 
very  basis  and  subject  of  his  work  should  repeatedly 
go  aground  on  such  shallows  as  these.  He  takes  for 
treatment  a  situation  that  is  substantially  none — the 
most  fundamental  this  of  his  values,  and  all  the  more 
compromising  that  his  immense  art  of  producing  illu- 
sions still  leaves  it  exposed.  The  idea  in  each  case  is 
superficially  specious,  but  where  it  breaks  down  is  what 
makes  all  the  difference.  "II  Piacere"  would  have 
meant  what  it  seems  to  try  to  mean  only  if  a  provi- 
sion had  been  made  in  it  for  some  adequate  "inward- 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  289 

ness"  on  the  part  either  of  the  nature  disintegrated  or 
of  the  other  nature  to  which  this  poisoned  contact 
proves  fatal.  "L'Innocente,"  of  the  group,  comes 
nearest  to  justifying  its  idea;  and  I  leave  it  unchal- 
lenged, though  its  meaning  surely  would  have  been 
written  larger  if  the  attitude  of  the  wife  toward  her 
misbegotten  child  had  been,  in  face  of  the  husband's, 
a  little  less  that  of  the  dumb  detached  animal  suffering 
in  her  simplicity.  As  a  picture  of  such  suffering,  the 
pain  of  the  mere  dumb  animal,  the  work  is  indeed 
magnificent;  only  its  connections  are  poor  with  the 
higher  dramatic,  the  higher  poetic,  complexity  of 
things. 

I  can  only  repeat  that  to  make  "The  Triumph  of 
Death"  a  fruitful  thing  we  should  have  been  able  to 
measure  the  triumph  by  its  frustration  of  some  con- 
ceivable opportunity  at  least  for  life.  There  is  a  mo- 
ment at  which  we  hope  for  something  of  this  kind, 
the  moment  at  which  the  young  man  pays  his  visit  to 
his  family,  who  have  grievous  need  of  him  and  toward 
whom  we  look  to  see  some  one  side  or  other  of  his 
fine  sensibility  turn.  But  nothing  comes  of  that  for 
the  simple  reason  that  the  personage  is  already  dead 
—that  nothing  exists  in  him  but  the  established  fear 
of  life.  He  turns  his  back  on  everything  but  a  special 
sensation,  and  so  completely  shuts  the  door  on  the 
elements  of  contrast  and  curiosity.  Death  really  tri- 
umphs, in  the  matter,  but  over  the  physical  terror  of 
the  inordinate  woman;  a  pang  perfectly  communi- 
cated to  us,  but  too  small  a  surface  to  bear  the  weight 
laid  on  it,  which  accordingly  affects  us  as  that  of  a 
pyramid  turned  over  on  its  point.  It  is  throughout 
one  of  D'Annunzio's  strongest  marks  that  he  treats 


290  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

"love"  as  a  matter  not  to  be  mixed  with  life,  in  the 
larger  sense  of  the  word,  at  all — as  a  matter  all  of 
whose  other  connections  are  dropped;  a  sort  of  secret 
game  that  can  go  on  only  if  each  of  the  parties  has 
nothing  to  do,  even  on  any  other  terms,  with  any  one 
else. 


I  have  dwelt  on  the  fact  that  the  sentimental  inten- 
tion in  "II  Fuoco"  quite  bewilderingly  fails,  in  spite 
of  the  splendid  accumulation  of  material.  We  wait  to 
the  end  to  see  it  declare  itself,  and  then  are  left,  as 
I  have  already  indicated,  with  a  mere  meaningless 
anecdote  on  our  hands.  Brilliant  and  free,  each 
freighted  with  a  talent  that  is  given  us  as  incompara- 
ble, the  parties  to  the  combination  depicted  have,  for 
their  affection,  the  whole  world  before  them — and  not 
the  simple  terraqueous  globe,  but  that  still  vaster 
sphere  of  the  imagination  in  which,  by  an  excep- 
tionally happy  chance,  they  are  able  to  move  together 
on  very  nearly  equal  terms.  A  tragedy  is  a  tragedy, 
a  comedy  is  a  comedy,  when  the  effect,  in  either  sense, 
is  determined  for  us,  determined  by  the  interference  of 
some  element  that  starts  a  complication  or  precipitates 
an  action.  As  in  "II  Fuoco"  nothing  whatever  inter- 
feres— or  nothing  certainly  that  need  weigh  with  the 
high  spirits  represented — we  ask  why  such  precious  rev- 
elations are  made  us  for  nothing.  Admirably  made  in 
themselves  they  yet  strike  us  as,  esthetically  speaking, 
almost  cruelly  wasted. 

This  general  remark  would  hold  good,  as  well,  of 
"Le  Vergini,"  if  I  might  still  linger,  though  its  appli- 
cation has  already  been  virtually  made.  Anatolia,  in 


GABRIELE   D'ANNUNZIO  291 

this  tale,  the  most  robust  of  the  three  sisters,  declines 
marriage  in  order  to  devote  herself  to  a  family  who 
have,  it  would  certainly  appear,  signal  need  of  her 
nursing.  But  this,  though  it  sufficiently  represents  her 
situation,  covers  as  little  as  possible  the  ground  of  the 
hero's  own,  since  he,  quivering  intensely  with  the 
treasure  of  his  "will,"  inherited  in  a  straight  line  from 
the  cinque-cento,  only  asks  to  affirm  his  sublimated 
energy.  The  temptation  to  affirm  it  erotically,  at 
least,  has  been  great  for  him  in  relation  to  each  of  the 
young  women  in  turn;  but  it  is  for  Anatolia  that  his 
admiration  and  affection  most  increase  in  volume,  and 
it  is  accordingly  for  her  sake  that,  with  the  wonderful 
moral  force  behind  him  (kept  as  in  a  Florentine  casket,) 
we  most  look  to  see  him  justified.  He  has  a  fine  image 
— and  when  has  the  author  not  fine  images  ? — to  illus- 
trate the  constant  readiness  of  this  possession.  The 
young  woman  says  something  that  inspires  him,  where- 
upon, "as  a  sudden  light  playing  over  the  dusky  wall 
of  a  room  causes  the  motionless  sword  in  a  trophy  to 
shine,  so  her  word  drew  a  great  flash  from  my  sus- 
pended volontd.  There  was  a  virtue  in  her,"  the  nar- 
rator adds,  "which  could  have  produced  portentous 
fruit.  Her  substance  might  have  nourished  a  super- 
human germ."  In  spite  of  which  it  never  succeeds  in 
becoming  so  much  as  a  question  that  his  affection  for 
her  shall  act,  that  this  grand  imagination  in  him  shall 
operate,  that  he  himself  is,  in  virtue  of  such  things, 
exactly  the  person  to  come  to  her  aid  and  to  combine 
with  her  in  devotion.  The  talk  about  the  volontd  is 
amusing  much  in  the  same  way  as  the  complacency  of 
a  primitive  man,  unacquainted  with  the  uses  of  things, 
who  becomes  possessed  by  some  accident  of  one  of  the 
toys  of  civilisation,  a  watch  or  a  motor-car.  And  yet 


292  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

artistically  and  for  our  author  the  will  has  an  appli- 
cation, since  without  it  he  could  have  done  no  rare 
vivid  work. 

Here  at  all  events  we  put  our  finger,  I  think,  on  the 
very  point  at  which  his  esthetic  plenitude  meets  the 
misadventure  that  discredits  it.  We  see  just  where  it 
"joins  on"  with  vulgarity.  That  sexual  passion  from 
which  he  extracts  such  admirable  detached  pictures  in- 
sists on  remaining  for  him  only  the  act  of  a  moment, 
beginning  and  ending  in  itself  and  disowning  any  rep- 
resentative character.  From  the  moment  it  depends 
on  itself  alone  for  its  beauty  it  endangers  extremely 
its  distinction,  so  precarious  at  the  best.  For  what  it 
represents,  precisely,  is  it  poetically  interesting;  it 
finds  its  extension  and  consummation  only  in  the  rest 
of  life.  Shut  out  from  the  rest  of  life,  shut  out  from 
all  fruition  and  assimilation,  it  has  no  more  dignity 
than — to  use  a  homely  image — the  boots  and  shoes 
that  we  see,  in  the  corridors  of  promiscuous  hotels, 
standing,  often  in  double  pairs,  at  the  doors  of  rooms. 
Detached  and  unassociated  these  clusters  of  objects 
present,  however  obtruded,  no  importance.  What  the 
participants  do  with  their  agitation,  in  short,  or  even 
what  it  does  with  them,  that  is  the  stuff  of  poetry,  and 
it  is  never  really  interesting  save  when  something 
finely  contributive  in  themselves  makes  it  so.  It  is 
this  absence  of  anything  finely  contributive  in  them- 
selves, on  the  part  of  the  various  couples  here  con- 
cerned, that  is  the  open  door  to  the  trivial.  I  have 
said,  with  all  appreciation,  that  they  present  the  great 
"relation,"  for  intimacy,  as  we  shall  nowhere  else  find 
it  presented;  but  to  see  it  related,  in  its  own  turn,  to 
nothing  in  the  heaven  above  or  the  earth  beneath, 


GABRIELE  D'ANNUNZIO  293 

this  undermines,  we  definitely  learn,  the  charm  of  that 
achievement. 

And  so  it  is,  strangely,  that  our  esthetic  "case"  en- 
lightens us.  The  only  question  is  whether  it  be  the 
only  case  of  the  kind  conceivable.  May  we  not  sup- 
pose another  with  the  elements  differently  mixed  ? 
May  we  not  in  imagination  alter  the  proportions  within 
or  the  influences  without,  and  look  with  cheerfulness 
for  a  different  issue  ?  Need  the  esthetic  adventure,  in 
a  word,  organised  for  real  discovery,  give  us  no  more 
comforting  news  of  success  ?  Are  there  not,  so  to 
speak,  finer  possible  combinations  ?  are  there  not  safe- 
guards against  futility  that  in  the  example  before  us 
were  but  too  presumably  absent  ?  To  which  the  sole 
answer  probably  is  that  no  man  can  say.  It  is  Signor 
D'Annunzio  alone  who  has  really  sailed  the  sea  and 
brought  back  the  booty.  The  actual  case  is  so  good 
that  all  the  potential  fade  beside  it.  It  has  for  it 
that  it  exists,  and  that,  whether  for  the  strength  of 
the  original  outfit  or  for  the  weight  of  the  final  testi- 
mony, it  could  scarce  thinkably  be  bettered. 


MATILDE  SERAO 

FEW  attentive  readers,  I  take  it,  would  deny  that  the 
English  novelist — from  whom,  in  this  case,  there  hap- 
pens to  be  even  less  occasion  than  usual  for  distin- 
guishing the  American — testifies  in  his  art  much  more 
than  his  foreign  comrade,  from  whatever  quarter,  to 
the  rigour  of  convention.  There  are  whole  sides  of 
life  about  which  he  has  as  little  to  say  as  possible, 
about  which  he  observes  indeed  in  general  a  silence 
that  has  visibly  ended  by  becoming  for  the  foreign 
comrade  his  great  characteristic.  He  strikes  the  spec- 
tator as  having  with  a  misplaced  humility  consented 
once  for  all  to  be  admonished  as  to  what  he  shall  or 
shall  not  "mention" — and  to  be  admonished  in  espe- 
cial by  an  authority  altogether  indefinite.  He  sub- 
scribes, when  his  turn  comes  round,  to  an  agreement 
in  the  drawing-up  of  which  he  has  had  no  hand;  he 
sits  down  to  his  task  with  a  certain  received  canon  of 
the  "proper"  before  his  eyes.  The  critic  I  am  sup- 
posing reproaches  him,  naturally,  in  this  critic's  way, 
with  a  marked  failure  ever  to  challenge,  much  less  to 
analyse,  that  conception;  with  having  never,  as  would 
appear,  so  much  as  put  to  himself  in  regard  to  most 
of  the  matters  of  which  he  makes  his  mystery  the 
simple  question  "Proper  to  what?"  How  can  any 
authority,  even  the  most  embodied,  asks  the  exponent 
of  other  views,  decide  for  us  in  advance  what  shall  in 
any  case  be  proper — with  the  consequent  implication 
of  impropriety — to  our  given  subject  ? 

294 


MATILDE  SERAO  295 

The  English  novelist  would,  I  imagine,  even  some- 
times be  led  on  to  finding  that  he  has  practically  had 
to  meet  such  an  overhauling  by  a  further  admission, 
though  an  admission  still  tacit  and  showing  him  not 
a  little  shy  of  the  whole  discussion — principles  and  for- 
mulas being  in  general,  as  we  know,  but  little  his 
affair.  Would  he  not,  if  off  his  guard,  have  been  in 
peril  of  lapsing  into  the  doctrine — suicidal  when  re- 
flected upon — that  there  may  be  also  an  a  priori  rule, 
a  "Thou  shalt  not,"  if  not  a  "Thou  shalt,"  as  to  treat- 
able subjects  themselves  ?  Then  it  would  be  that  his 
alien  foe  might  fairly  revel  in  the  sense  of  having  him 
in  a  corner,  laughing  an  evil  laugh  to  hear  him  plead 
in  explanation  that  it  is  exactly  most  as  to  the  sub- 
ject to  be  treated  that  he  feels  the  need  laid  upon  him 
to  conform.  What  is  he  to  do  when  he  has  an  idea  to 
embody,  we  might  suspect  him  rashly  to  inquire,  un- 
less, frankly  to  ask  himself  in  the  first  place  of  all  if 
it  be  proper  ?  Not  indeed — we  catch  the  reservation— 
that  he  is  consciously  often  accessible  to  ideas  for 
which  that  virtue  may  not  be  claimed.  Naturally, 
however,  still,  such  a  plea  only  brings  forth  for  his 
interlocutor  a  repetition  of  the  original  appeal:  "Proper 
to  what  ?"  There  is  only  one  propriety  the  painter  of 
life  can  ask  of  his  morsel  of  material:  Is  it,  or  is  it 
not,  of  the  stuff  of  life  ?  So,  in  simplified  terms  at 
any  rate,  I  seem  to  hear  the  interchange;  to  which  I 
need  listen  no  longer  than  thus  to  have  derived  from 
it  a  word  of  support  for  my  position.  The  question  of 
our  possible  rejoinder  to  the  scorn  of  societies  other- 
wise affected  I  must  leave  for  some  other  connection. 
The  point  is — if  point  I  may  expect  to  obtain  any 
countenance  to  its  being  called — that,  in  spite  of  our 
great  Dickens  and,  in  a  minor  degree,  of  our  great 


296  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

George  Eliot,  the  limitations  of  our  practice  are  else- 
where than  among  ourselves  pretty  well  held  to  have 
put  us  out  of  court.  The  thing  least  conceded  to  us 
moreover  is  that  we  handle  at  all  frankly — if  we  put 
forward  such  a  claim — even  our  own  subject-matter  or 
in  other  words  our  own  life.  "Your  own  is  all  we 
want  of  you,  all  we  should  like  to  see.  But  that  your 
system  really  touches  your  own  is  exactly  what  we 
deny.  Never,  never!"  For  what  it  really  comes  to 
is  that  practically  we,  of  all  people  in  the  world,  are 
accused  of  a  system.  Call  this  system  a  conspiracy  of 
silence,  and  the  whole  charge  is  upon  us. 

The  fact  of  the  silence,  whether  or  no  of  the  system, 
is  fortunately  all  that  at  present  concerns  us.  Did  this 
not  happen  to  be  the  case  nothing  could  be  more  in- 
teresting, I  think,  than  to  follow  somewhat  further 
several  of  the  bearings  of  the  matter,  which  would 
bring  us  face  to  face  with  some  wonderful  and,  I 
hasten  to  add,  by  no  means  doubtless  merely  discon- 
certing truths  about  ourselves.  It  has  been  given  us 
to  read  a  good  deal,  in  these  latter  days,  about  I'ame 
Fran$aise  and  Vame  Russe — and  with  the  result,  in  all 
probability,  of  our  being  rather  less  than  more  pene- 
trated with  the  desire,  in  emulation  of  these  oppor- 
tunities, to  deliver  ourselves  upon  the  English  or  the 
American  soul.  There  would  appear  to  be  nothing 
we  are  totally  conscious  of  that  we  are  less  eager  to 
reduce  to  the  mere  expressible,  to  hand  over  to  pub- 
licity, current  journalistic  prose  aiding,  than  either  of 
these  fine  essences;  and  yet  incontestably  there  are 
neighbourhoods  in  which  we  feel  ourselves  within  scent 
and  reach  of  them  by  something  of  the  same  sense 
that  in  thick  forests  serves  the  hunter  of  great  game. 


MATILDE  SERAO  297 

He  may  not  quite  touch  the  precious  presence,  but  he 
knows  when  it  is  near.  So  somehow  we  know  that 
the  "Anglo-Saxon"  soul,  the  modern  at  least,  is  not 
far  off  when  we  frankly  consider  the  practice  of  our 
race — comparatively  recent  though  it  be — in  taking 
for  granted  the  "innocence"  of  literature. 

Our  perhaps  a  trifle  witless  way  of  expressing  our 
conception  of  this  innocence  and  our  desire  for  it  is, 
characteristically  enough,  by  taking  refuge  in  another 
vagueness,  by  invoking  the  allowances  that  we  under- 
stand works  of  imagination  and  of  criticism  to  make 
to  the  "young."  I  know  not  whether  it  has  ever  offi- 
cially been  stated  for  us  that,  given  the  young,  given 
literature,  and  given,  under  stress,  the  need  of  sacri- 
ficing one  or  the  other  party,  it  is  not  certainly  by 
our  sense  of  "style"  that  our  choice  would  be  deter- 
mined: no  great  art  in  the  reading  of  signs  and  symp- 
toms is  at  all  events  required  for  a  view  of  our  prob- 
able instinct  in  such  a  case.  That  instinct,  however, 
has  too  many  deep  things  in  it  to  be  briefly  or  easily 
disposed  of,  and  there  would  be  no  greater  mistake  than 
to  attempt  too  simple  an  account  of  it.  The  account 
most  likely  to  be  given  by  a  completely  detached  critic 
would  be  that  we  are  as  a  race  better  equipped  for 
action  than  for  thought,  and  that  to  let  the  art  of 
expression  go  by  the  board  is  through  that  very  fact 
to  point  to  the  limits  of  what  we  mostly  have  to  express. 
If  we  accept  such  a  report  we  shall  do  so,  I  think, 
rather  from  a  strong  than  from  a  weak  sense  of  what 
may  easily  be  made  of  it;  but  I  glance  at  these  things 
only  as  at  objects  almost  too  flooded  with  light,  and 
come  back  after  my  parenthesis  to  what  more  imme- 
diately concerns  me:  the  plain  reflection  that,  if  the 


298  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

element  of  compromise — compromise  with  fifty  of  the 
"facts  of  life" — be  the  common  feature  of  the  novel 
of  English  speech,  so  it  is  mainly  indebted  for  this 
character  to  the  sex  comparatively  without  a  feeling 
for  logic. 

Nothing  is  at  any  rate  a  priori  more  natural  than 
to  trace  a  connection  between  our  general  mildness, 
as  it  may  conveniently  be  called,  and  the  fact  that 
we  are  likewise  so  generally  feminine.  Is  the  English 
novel  "proper"  because  it  is  so  much  written  by  women, 
or  is  it  only  so  much  written  by  women  because  its 
propriety  has  been  so  firmly  established  ?  The  inti- 
mate relation  is  on  either  determination  all  that  is 
here  pertinent — effect  and  cause  may  be  left  to  them- 
selves. What  is  further  pertinent,  as  happens,  is  that 
on  a  near  view  the  relation  is  not  constant;  by  which 
I  mean  that,  though  the  ladies  are  always  productive, 
the  fashion  of  mildness  is  not  always  the  same.  Con- 
vention in  short  has  its  ups  and  downs,  and  these  vo- 
taries have  of  late  years,  I  think,  been  as  often  seen 
weltering  in  the  hollow  of  the  wave  as  borne  aloft  on 
its  crest.  Some  of  them  may  even  be  held  positively 
to  have  distinguished  themselves  most — whether  or  no 
in  veils  of  anonymity — on  the  occasion  of  the  down- 
ward movement;  making  us  really  wonder  if  their 
number  might  not  fairly,  under  any  steadier  force  of 
such  a  movement,  be  counted  on  to  increase.  All 
sorts  of  inquiries  are  suggested  in  truth  by  the  sight. 
"Emancipations"  are  in  the  air,  and  may  it  not  pos- 
sibly be  that  we  shall  see  two  of  the  most  striking  coin- 
cide ?  If  convention  has,  to  the  tune  to  which  I  just 
invited  an  ear,  blighted  our  fiction,  what  shall  we  say 
of  its  admitted,  its  still  more  deprecated  and  in  so 


MATILDE  SERAO  299 

many  quarters  even  deplored,  effect  upon  the  great 
body  under  the  special  patronage  of  which  the  "out- 
put" has  none  the  less  insisted  on  becoming  incom- 
parably copious  ?  Since  the  general  inaptitude  of 
women  appears  by  this  time  triumphantly  to  have 
been  proved  an  assumption  particularly  hollow,  de- 
spoiled more  and  more  each  day  of  the  last  tatters  of 
its  credit,  why  should  not  the  new  force  thus  liber- 
ated really,  in  the  connection  I  indicate,  give  some- 
thing of  its  measure  ? 

It  is  at  any  rate  keeping  within  bounds  to  say  that 
the  novel  will  surely  not  become  less  free  in  propor- 
tion as  the  condition  of  women  becomes  more  easy. 
It  is  more  or  less  in  deference  to  their  constant  con- 
cern with  it  that  we  have  seen  it,  among  ourselves, 
pick  its  steps  so  carefully;  but  there  are  indications 
that  the  future  may  reserve  us  the  surprise  of  having 
to  thank  the  very  class  whose  supposed  sensibilities 
have  most  oppressed  us  for  teaching  it  not  only  a 
longer  stride,  but  a  healthy  indifference  to  an  occa- 
sional splash.  It  is  for  instance  only  of  quite  recent 
years  that  the  type  of  fiction  commonly  identified  as 
the  "sexual"  has  achieved — for  purposes  of  reference, 
so  far  as  notices  in  newspapers  may  be  held  to  consti- 
tute reference — a  salience  variously  estimated.  Now 
therefore,  though  it  is  early  to  say  that  all  "imagina- 
tive work"  from  the  female  hand  is  subject  to  this 
description,  there  is  assuredly  none  markedly  so  sub- 
ject that  is  not  from  the  female  hand.  The  female 
mind  has  in  fact  throughout  the  competition  carried 
off  the  prize  in  the  familiar  game,  known  to  us  all 
from  childhood's  hour,  of  playing  at  "grown-up;" 
finding  thus  its  opportunity,  with  no  small  acuteness, 


3oo  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

in  the  more  and  more  marked  tendency  of  the  mind 
of  the  other  gender  to  revert,  alike  in  the  grave  and 
the  gay,  to  those  simplicities  which  there  would  ap- 
pear to  be  some  warrant  for  pronouncing  puerile.  It 
is  the  ladies  in  a  word  who  have  lately  done  most  to 
remind  us  of  man's  relations  with  himself,  that  is  with 
woman.  His  relations  with  the  pistol,  the  pirate,  the 
police,  the  wild  and  the  tame  beast — are  not  these 
prevailingly  what  the  gentlemen  have  given  us  ?  And 
does  not  the  difference  sufficiently  point  my  moral  ? 

Let  me,  however,  not  seem  to  have  gone  too  far 
afield  to  seek  it;  for  my  reflections — general  perhaps 
to  excess — closely  connect  themselves  with  a  subject 
to  which  they  are  quite  ready  to  yield  in  interest.  I 
have  lately  been  giving  a  happy  extension  to  an  old 
acquaintance,  dating  from  early  in  the  eighties,  with 
the  striking  romantic  work  of  Matilde  Serao;  a  writer 
who,  apart  from  other  successes,  has  the  excellent  ef- 
fect, the  sign  of  the  stronger  few,  that  the  end  of  her 
story  is,  for  her  reader,  never  the  end  of  her  work. 
On  thus  recently  returning  to  her  I  have  found  in  her 
something  much  more  to  my  present  purpose  than  the 
mere  appearance  of  power  and  ease.  If  she  is  inter- 
esting largely  because  she  is,  in  the  light  of  her  free, 
her  extraordinary  Neapolitan  temperament,  a  vivid 
painter  and  a  rich  register  of  sensations  and  impres- 
sions, she  is  still  more  so  as  an  exceptionally  compact 
and  suggestive  case,  a  case  exempt  from  interference 
and  presenting  itself  with  a  beautiful  unconsciousness. 
She  has  had  the  good  fortune — if  it  be,  after  all,  not 
the  ill — to  develop  in  an  air  in  which  convention,  in 
our  invidious  sense,  has  had  as  little  to  say  to  her  as 
possible;  and  she  is  accordingly  a  precious  example  of 


MATILDE  SERAO  301 

the  possibilities  of  free  exercise.  The  questions  of  the 
proper  and  the  improper  are  comfortably  far  from 
her;  and  though  more  than  in  the  line  of  her  sisters 
of  English  speech  she  may  have  to  reckon  with  pre- 
scriptions as  to  form — a  burden  at  which  in  truth  she 
snaps  her  fingers  with  an  approach  to  impertinence — 
she  moves  in  a  circle  practically  void  of  all  pre-judg- 
ment  as  to  subject  and  matter.  Conscious  enough, 
doubtless,  of  a  literary  law  to  be  offended,  and  caring 
little  in  fact,  I  repeat — for  it  is  her  weakness — what 
wrong  it  may  suffer,  she  has  not  even  the  agreeable 
incentive  of  an  ability  to  calculate  the  "moral"  shocks 
she  may  administer. 

Practically  chartered  then  she  is  further  happy— 
since  they  both  minister  to  ease — in  two  substantial 
facts:  she  is  a  daughter  of  the  veritable  south  and  a 
product  of  the  contemporary  newspaper.  A  Neapol- 
itan by  birth  and  a  journalist  by  circumstance,  by 
marriage  and  in  some  degree  doubtless  also  by  incli- 
nation, she  strikes  for  us  from  the  first  the  note  of 
facility  and  spontaneity  and  the  note  of  initiation  and 
practice.  Concerned,  through  her  husband,  in  the 
conduct  of  a  Neapolitan  morning  paper,  of  a  large  cir- 
culation and  a  radical  colour,  she  has,  as  I  infer,  pro- 
duced her  novels  and  tales  mainly  in  such  snatches  of 
time  and  of  inspiration  as  have  been  left  her  by  ur- 
gent day-to-day  journalism.  They  distinctly  betray, 
throughout,  the  conditions  of  their  birth — so  little  are 
they  to  the  literary  sense  children  of  maturity  and 
leisure.  On  the  question  of  style  in  a  foreign  writer 
it  takes  many  contributive  lights  to  make  us  sure  of 
our  ground;  but  I  feel  myself  on  the  safe  side  in  con- 
ceiving that  this  lady,  full  of  perception  and  vibration, 


302  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

can  not  only  not  figure  as  a  purist,  but  must  be  supposed 
throughout,  in  spite  of  an  explosive  eloquence,  to  pre- 
tend but  little  to  distinction  of  form:  which  for  an 
Italian  is  a  much  graver  predicament  than  for  one  of 
our  shapeless  selves.  That,  however,  would  perhaps 
pass  for  a  small  quarrel  with  a  writer,  or  rather  with 
a  talker  and — for  it  is  what  one  must  most  insist  on — 
a  feeler,  of  Matilde  Serao's  remarkable  spontaneity. 
Her  Neapolitan  nature  is  by  itself  a  value,  to  what- 
ever literary  lapses  it  may  minister.  ~A  torch  kindled 
at  that  flame  can  be  but  freely  waved,  and  our  au- 
thor's arm  has  a  fine  action.  Loud,  loquacious,  abun- 
dant, natural,  happy,  with  luxurious  insistences  on  the 
handsome,  the  costly  and  the  fleshly,  the  fine  persons 
and  fine  clothes  of  her  characters,  their  satin  and 
velvet,  their  bracelets,  rings,  white  waistcoats,  general 
appointments  and  bedroom  furniture,  with  almost  as 
many  repetitions  and  as  free  a  tongue,  in  short,  as 
Juliet's  nurse,  she  reflects  at  every  turn  the  wonder- 
ful mixture  that  surrounds  her — the  beauty,  the  misery, 
the  history,  the  light  and  noise  and  dust,  the  prolonged 
paganism  and  the  renewed  reactions,  the  great  style  of 
the  distant  and  the  past  and  the  generally  compro- 
mised state  of  the  immediate  and  the  near.  These 
things  were  all  in  the  germ  for  the  reader  of  her  ear- 
lier novels — they  have  since  only  gathered  volume  and 
assurance — so  that  I  well  remember  the  impression 
made  on  me,  when  the  book  was  new  (my  copy,  ap- 
parently of  the  first  edition,  bears  the  date  of  1885), 
by  the  rare  energy,  the  immense  disinvoltura,  of  "La 
Conquista  di  Roma."  This  was  my  introduction  to 
the  author,  in  consequence  of  which  I  immediately 
read  "Fantasia"  and  the  "Vita  e  Avventure  di  Ric- 
cardo  Joanna,"  with  some  smaller  pieces;  after  which, 


MATILDE   SERAO  303 

interrupted  but  not  detached,  I  knew  nothing  more 
till,  in  the  course  of  time,  I  renewed  acquaintance  on 
the  ground  of  "II  Paese  di  Cuccagna,"  then,  however, 
no  longer  in  its  first  freshness.  That  work  set  me 
straightway  to  reading  everything  else  I  could  lay 
hands  on,  and  I  think  therefore  that,  save  "II  Ventre 
di  Napoli"  and  two  or  three  quite  recent  productions 
that  I  have  not  met,  there  is  nothing  from  our  author 
that  I  have  not  mastered.  Such  as  I  find  her  in 
everything,  she  remains  above  all  things  the  signal 
"case." 

If,  however,  she  appears,  as  I  am  bound  to  note, 
not  to  have  kept  the  full  promise  of  her  early  energy, 
this  is  because  it  has  suited  her  to  move  less  in  the  di- 
rection— where  so  much  might  have  awaited  her — of 
"Riccardo  Joanna"  and  "La  Conquista"  than  in  that, 
on  the  whole  less  happily  symptomatic,  of  "Fantasia." 
"Fantasia"  is,  before  all  else,  a  study  of  "passion," 
or  rather  of  the  intenser  form  of  that  mystery  which 
the  Italian  passione  better  expresses;  and  I  hasten  to 
confess  that  had  she  not  so  marked  herself  an  expo- 
nent of  this  specialty  I  should  probably  not  now  be 
writing  of  her.  I  conceive  none  the  less  that  it  would 
have  been  open  to  her  to  favour  more  that  side  of  her 
great  talent  of  which  the  so  powerful  "Paese  di  Cuc- 
cagna" is  the  strongest  example.  There  is  by  good 
fortune  in  this  large  miscellaneous  picture  of  Neapoli- 
tan life  no  passione  save  that  of  the  observer  curiously 
and  pityingly  intent  upon  it,  that  of  the  artist  resolute 
at  any  cost  to  embrace  and  reproduce  it.  Admirably, 
easily,  convincingly  objective,  the  thing  is  a  sustained 
panorama,  a  chronicle  of  manners  finding  its  unity  in 
one  recurrent  note,  that  of  the  consuming  lottery-hun- 


304  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ger  which  constitutes  the  joy,  the  curse,  the  obsession 
and  the  ruin,  according  to  Matilde  Serao,  of  her  fel- 
low-citizens. Her  works  are  thus  divided  by  a  some- 
what unequal  line,  those  on  one  side  of  which  the 
critic  is  tempted  to  accuse  her  of  having  not  altogether 
happily  sacrificed  to  those  on  the  other.  When  she 
for  the  most  part  invokes  under  the  name  of  passione 
the  main  explanation  of  the  mortal  lot  it  is  to  follow 
the  windings  of  this  clue  in  the  upper  walks  of  life, 
to  haunt  the  aristocracy,  to  embrace  the  world  of 
fashion,  to  overflow  with  clothes,  jewels  and  promis- 
cuous intercourse,  all  to  the  proportionate  eclipse  of 
her  strong,  full  vision  of  the  more  usually  vulgar. 
"La  Conquista"  is  the  story  of  a  young  deputy  who 
comes  up  to  the  Chamber,  from  the  Basilicata,  with 
a  touching  candour  of  ambition  and  a  perilous  igno- 
rance of  the  pitfalls  of  capitals.  His  dream  is  to  con- 
quer Rome,  but  it  is  by  Rome  naturally  that  he  is 
conquered.  He  alights  on  his  political  twig  with  a 
flutter  of  wings,  but  has  reckoned  in  his  innocence 
without  the  strong  taste  in  so  many  quarters  for  sport; 
and  it  is  with  a  charge  of  shot  in  his  breast  and  a 
drag  of  his  pinions  in  the  dust  that  he  takes  his  way 
back  to  mediocrity,  obscurity  and  the  parent  nest. 
It  is  from  the  ladies — as  was  indeed  even  from  the 
first  to  be  expected  with  Serao — that  he  receives  his 
doom;  passione  is  in  these  pages  already  at  the  door 
and  soon  arrives;  passione  rapidly  enough  passes  its 
sponge  over  everything  not  itself. 

In  "Cuore  Infermo,"  in  "Addio  Amore,"  in  "II 
Castigo,"  in  the  two  volumes  of  "Gli  Amanti"  and  in 
various  other  pieces  this  effacement  is  so  complete  that 
we  see  the  persons  concerned  but  in  the  one  relation, 


MATILDE  SERAO  305 

with  every  other  circumstance,  those  of  concurrent 
profession,  possession,  occupation,  connection,  inter- 
est, amusement,  kinship,  utterly  superseded  and  ob- 
scured. Save  in  the  three  or  four  books  I  have 
named  as  exceptional  the  figures  evoked  are  literally 
professional  lovers,  "available,"  as  the  term  is,  for 
passione  alone:  which  is  the  striking  sign,  as  I  shall 
presently  indicate,  of  the  extremity  in  which  her  en- 
joyment of  the  freedom  we  so  often  have  to  envy  has 
strangely  landed  our  author.  "Riccardo  Joanna," 
which,  like  "La  Conquista,"  has  force,  humour  and 
charm,  sounding  with  freshness  the  note  of  the  gen- 
eral life,  is  such  a  picture  of  certain  of  the  sordid  con- 
ditions of  Italian  journalism  as,  if  I  may  trust  my 
memory  without  re-perusal,  sharply  and  pathetically 
imposes  itself.  I  recall  "Fantasia"  on  the  other  hand 
as  wholly  passione — all  concentration  and  erotics,  the 
latter  practised  in  this  instance,  as  in  "Addio  Amore," 
with  extreme  cruelty  to  the  "good"  heroine,  the  per- 
son innocent  and  sacrificed;  yet  this  volume  too  con- 
tributes its  part  in  the  retrospect  to  that  appearance 
of  marked  discipleship  which  was  one  of  the  original 
sources  of  my  interest.  Nothing  could  more  have  en- 
gaged one's  attention  in  these  matters  at  that  moment 
than  the  fresh  phenomenon  of  a  lady-novelist  so  con- 
fessedly flushed  with  the  influence  of  £mile  Zola. 
Passing  among  ourselves  as  a  lurid  warning  even  to 
workers  of  his  own  sex,  he  drew  a  new  grace  from  the 
candid  homage — all  implied  and  indirect,  but,  as  I  re- 
figure  my  impression,  not  the  less  unmistakable — of 
that  half  of  humanity  which,  let  alone  attempting  to 
follow  in  his  footsteps,  was  not  supposed  even  to  turn 
his  pages.  There  is  an  episode  in  "Fantasia" — a 
scene  in  which  the  relations  of  the  hero  and  the  "bad" 


306  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

heroine  are  strangely  consolidated  by  a  visit  together 
to  a  cattle-show — in  which  the  courage  of  the  pupil 
has  but  little  to  envy  the  breadth  of  the  master.  The 
hot  day  and  hot  hour,  the  heavy  air  and  the  strong 
smells,  the  great  and  small  beasts,  the  action  on  the 
sensibilities  of  the  lady  and  the  gentleman  of  the  rich 
animal  life,  the  collapse  indeed  of  the  lady  in  the  pres- 
ence of  the  prize  bull — all  these  are  touches  for  which 
luckily  our  author  has  the  warrant  of  a  greater  name. 
The  general  picture,  in  "  Fantasia,"  of  the  agricultural 
exhibition  at  Caserta  is  in  fact  not  the  worse  at  any 
point  for  a  noticeable  echo  of  more  than  one  French 
model.  Would  the  author  have  found  so  full  an  oc- 
casion in  it  without  a  fond  memory  of  the  immortal 
Cornices  of  "Madame  Bovary"  ? 

These,  however,  are  minor  questions — pertinent  only 
as  connecting  themselves  with  the  more  serious  side 
of  her  talent.  We  may  rejoice  in  such  a  specimen  of 
it  as  is  offered  by  the  too  brief  series  of  episodes  of 
"The  Romance  of  the  Maiden."  These  things,  deal- 
ing mainly  with  the  small  miseries  of  small  folk,  have 
a  palpable  truth,  and  it  is  striking  that,  to  put  the 
matter  simply,  Madame  Serao  is  at  her  best  almost  in 
direct  proportion  as  her  characters  are  poor.  By  poor 
I  mean  literally  the  reverse  of  rich;  for  directly  they 
are  rich  and  begin,  as  the  phrase  is,  to  keep  their  car- 
riage, her  taste  totters  and  lapses,  her  style  approxi- 
mates at  moments  to  that  of  the  ladies  who  do  the 
fashions  and  the  letters  from  the  watering-places  in 
the  society  papers.  She  has  acutely  and  she  renders 
with  excellent  breadth  the  sense  of  benighted  lives,  of 
small  sordid  troubles,  of  the  general  unhappy  youth- 
ful (on  the  part  of  her  own  sex  at  least)  and  the  gen- 


MATILDE   SERAO  307 

eral  more  or  less  starved  plebeian  consciousness.  The 
degree  to  which  it  testifies  to  all  this  is  one  of  the 
great  beauties  of  "II  Paese  di  Cuccagna,"  even  if  the 
moral  of  that  dire  picture  be  simply  that  in  respect 
to  the  gaming-passion,  the  madness  of  "numbers,"  no 
walk  of  life  at  Naples  is  too  high  or  too  low  to  be 
ravaged.  Beautiful,  in  "II  Romanzo  della  Fanciulla," 
are  the  exhibitions  of  grinding  girl-life  in  the  big  tele- 
graph office  and  in  the  State  normal  school.  The  gem 
of  "Gli  Amanti"  is  the  tiny  tale  of  "Vicenzella,"  a 
masterpiece  in  twenty  small  pages — the  vision  of  what 
three  or  four  afternoon  hours  could  contain  for  a  slip 
of  a  creature  of  the  Naples  waterside,  a  poor  girl  who 
picks  up  a  living  by  the  cookery  and  sale,  on  the  edge 
of  a  parapet,  of  various  rank  dismembered  polyps  of 
the  southern  sea,  and  who  is  from  stage  to  stage  de- 
spoiled of  the  pence  she  patiently  pockets  for  them  by 
the  successive  small  emissaries  of  her  artful,  absent 
lover,  constantly  faithless,  occupied,  not  too  far  off, 
in  regaling  a  lady  of  his  temporary  preference,  and 
proportionately  clamorous  for  fresh  remittances.  The 
moment  and  the  picture  are  but  a  scrap,  yet  they  are 
as  large  as  life. 

"Canituccia,"  in  "Piccole  Anime,"  may  happily  pair 
with  "Vicenzella,"  Canituccia  being  simply  the  hum- 
ble rustic  guardian,  in  field  and  wood — scarce  more 
than  a  child — of  the  still  more  tender  Ciccotto;  and 
Ciccotto  being  a  fine  young  pink-and-white  pig,  an 
animal  of  endowments  that  lead,  after  he  has  had 
time  to  render  infatuated  his  otherwise  quite  solitary 
and  joyless  friend,  to  his  premature  conversion  into 
bacon.  She  assists,  helplessly  silent,  staring,  almost 
idiotic,  from  a  corner  of  the  cabin-yard,  by  night  and 


308  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

lamplight,  in  the  presence  of  gleaming  knives  and 
steaming  pots  and  bloody  tubs,  at  the  sacrifice  that 
deprives  her  of  all  company,  and  nothing  can  exceed  the 
homely  truth  of  the  touch  that  finally  rounds  off 
the  scene  and  for  which  I  must  refer  my  reader  to 
the  volume.  Let  me  further  not  fail  to  register  my 
admiration  for  the  curious  cluster  of  scenes  that,  in 
"II  Romanzo,"  bears  the  title  of  "Nella  Lava."  Here 
frankly,  I  take  it,  we  have  the  real  principle  of  "nat- 
uralism"— a  consistent  presentment  of  the  famous 
"slice  of  life."  The  slices  given  us — slices  of  shabby 
hungry  maidenhood  in  small  cockney  circles — are  but 
sketchily  related  to  the  volcanic  catastrophe  we  hear 
rumbling  behind  them,  the  undertone  of  all  the  noise 
of  Naples;  but  they  have  the  real  artistic  importance 
of  showing  us  how  little  "story"  is  required  to  hold 
us  when  we  get,  before  the  object  evoked  and  in  the 
air  created,  the  impression  of  the  real  thing.  What- 
ever thing — interesting  inference — has  but  effectively 
to  be  real  to  constitute  in  itself  story  enough.  There 
is  no  story  without  it,  none  that  is  not  rank  humbug; 
whereas  with  it  the  very  desert  blooms. 

This  last-named  phenomenon  takes  place,  I  fear,  but 
in  a  minor  degree  in  such  of  our  author's  productions 
as  "Cuore  Infermo,"  "Addio  Amore,"  "II  Castigo" 
and  the  double  series  of  "Gli  Amanti";  and  for  a 
reason  that  I  the  more  promptly  indicate  as  it  not 
only  explains,  I  think,  the  comparative  inanity  of 
these  pictures,  but  does  more  than  anything  else  to 
reward  our  inquiry.  The  very  first  reflection  sug- 
gested by  Serao's  novels  of  "passion"  is  that  they 
perfectly  meet  our  speculation  as  to  what  might  with 
a  little  time  become  of  our  own  fiction  were  our  par- 


MATILDE  SERAO  309 

ticular  convention  suspended.  We  see  so  what,  on  its 
actual  lines,  does,  what  has,  become  of  it,  and  are  so 
sated  with  the  vision  that  a  little  consideration  of  the 
latent  other  chance  will  surely  but  refresh  us.  The 
effect  then,  we  discover,  of  the  undertaking  to  give 
passione  its  whole  place  is  that  by  the  operation  of  a 
singular  law  no  place  speedily  appears  to  be  left  for 
anything  else;  and  the  effect  of  that  in  turn  is  greatly 
to  modify,  first,  the  truth  of  things,  and  second,  with 
small  delay,  what  may  be  left  them  of  their  beauty. 
We  find  ourselves  wondering  after  a  little  whether 
there  may  not  really  be  more  truth  in  the  world  mis- 
represented according  to  our  own  familiar  fashion  than 
in  such  a  world  as  that  of  Madame  Serao's  exuberant 
victims  of  Venus.  It  is  not  only  that  if  Venus  herself 
is  notoriously  beautiful  her  altar,  as  happens,  is  by  no 
means  always  proportionately  august;  it  is  also  that 
we  draw,  in  the  long  run,  small  comfort  from  the  vir- 
tual suppression,  by  any  painter,  of  whatever  skill— 
and  the  skill  of  this  particular  one  fails  to  rise  to  the 
height — of  every  relation  in  life  but  that  over  which 
Venus  presides.  In  "Fior  di  Passione"  and  the  sev- 
eral others  of  a  like  connection  that  I  have  named  the 
suppression  is  really  complete;  the  common  humani- 
ties and  sociabilities  are  wholly  absent  from  the  picture. 

The  effect  of  this  is  extraordinarily  to  falsity  the 
total  show  and  to  present  the  particular  affair — the 
intimacy  in  hand  for  the  moment,  though  the  mo- 
ment be  but  brief — as  taking  place  in  a  strange  false 
perspective,  a  denuded  desert  which  experience  surely 
fails  ever  to  give  us  the  like  of  and  the  action  of  which 
on  the  faculty  of  observation  in  the  painter  is  any- 
thing but  favourable.  It  strikes  at  the  root,  in  the 


3io  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

impression  producible  and  produced,  of  discrimination 
and  irony,  of  humour  and  pathos.  Our  present  au- 
thor would  doubtless  contend  on  behalf  of  the  works 
I  have  mentioned  that  pathos  at  least  does  abound  in 
them — the  particular  bitterness,  the  inevitable  despair 
that  she  again  and  again  shows  to  be  the  final  savour 
of  the  cup  of  passione.  It  would  be  quite  open  to  her 
to  urge — and  she  would  be  sure  to  do  so  with  eloquence 
—that  if  we  pusillanimously  pant  for  a  moral,  no  moral 
really  can  have  the  force  of  her  almost  inveterate 
evocation  of  the  absolute  ravage  of  Venus,  the  dry. 
desolation  that  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  Venus  may  be 
perceived  to  leave  behind  her.  That,  however,  but 
half  meets  our  argument — which  bears  by  no  means 
merely  on  the  desolation  behind,  but  on  the  desolation 
before,  beside  and  generally  roundabout.  It  is  not  in 
short  at  all  the  moral  but  the  fable  itself  that  in  the  ex- 
clusively sexual  light  breaks  down  and  fails  us.  Love, 
at  Naples  and  in  Rome,  as  Madame  Serao  exhibits  it,  is 
simply  unaccompanied  with  any  interplay  of  our  usual 
conditions — with  affection,  with  duration,  with  circum- 
stances or  consequences,  with  friends,  enemies,  hus- 
bands, wives,  children,  parents,  interests,  occupations, 
the  manifestation  of  tastes.  Who  are  these  people,  we 
presently  ask  ourselves,  who  love  indeed  with  fury — 
though  for  the  most  part  with  astonishing  brevity— 
but  who  are  so  without  any  suggested  situation  in  life 
that  they  can  only  strike  us  as  loving  for  nothing  and 
in  the  void,  to  no  gain  of  experience  and  no  effect  of 
a  felt  medium  or  a  breathed  air.  We  know  them  by 
nothing  but  their  convulsions  and  spasms,  and  we  feel 
once  again  that  it  is  not  the  passion  of  hero  and  hero- 
ine that  gives,  that  can  ever  give,  the  heroine  and  the 
hero  interest,  but  that  it  is  they  themselves,  with  the 


MATILDE  SERAO  311 

ground  they  stand  on  and  the  objects  enclosing  them, 
who  give  interest  to  their  passion.  This  element 
touches  us  just  in  proportion  as  we  see  it  mixed  with 
other  things,  with  all  the  things  with  which  it  has  to 
reckon  and  struggle.  There  is  moreover  another  re- 
flection with  which  the  pathetic  in  this  connection  has 
to  count,  even  though  it  undermine  not  a  little  the 
whole  of  the  tragic  effect  of  the  agitations  of  passione. 
Is  it,  ruthlessly  speaking,  certain  that  the  effect  most 
consonant,  for  the  spectator,  with  truth  is  half  as 
tragic  as  it  is  something  else  ?  Should  not  the  moral 
be  sought  in  the  very  different  quarter  where  the  muse 
of  comedy  rather  would  have  the  last  word  ?  The 
ambiguity  and  the  difficulty  are,  it  strikes  me,  of  a 
new  growth,  and  spring  from  a  perverse  desire  on  the 
part  of  the  erotic  novelist  to  secure  for  the  adventures 
he  depicts  a  dignity  that  is  not  of  the  essence.  To 
compass  this  dignity  he  has  to  cultivate  the  high  pitch 
and  beat  the  big  drum,  but  when  he  has  done  so  he 
has  given  everything  the  wrong  accent  and  the  whole 
the  wrong  extravagance.  Why  see  it  all,  we  ask  him, 
as  an  extravagance  of  the  solemn  and  the  strained  ? 
Why  make  such  an  erotic  a  matter  of  tears  and  im- 
precations, and  by  so  doing  render  so  poor  a  service 
both  to  pleasure  and  to  pain  ?  Since  by  your  own  free 
showing  it  is  pre-eminently  a  matter  of  folly,  let  us  at 
least  have  folly  with  her  bells,  or  when  these  must— 
since  they  must — sound  knells  and  dirges,  leave  them 
only  to  the  light  hand  of  the  lyric  poet,  who  turns 
them  at  the  worst  to  music.  Matilde  Serao  is  in  this 
connection  constantly  lugubrious;  even  from  the  little 
so-called  pastels  of  "Gli  Amanti"  she  manages,  with 
an  ingenuity  worthy  of  a  better  cause,  to  expunge  the 
note  of  gaiety. 


3i2  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

This  dismal  parti  pris  indeed  will  inevitably,  it  is 
be  feared,  when  all  the  emancipations  shall  have  said 
their  last  word,  be  that  of  the  ladies.  Yet  perhaps 
too,  whatever  such  a  probability,  the  tone  scarce  sig- 
nifies— in  the  presence,  I  mean,  of  the  fundamental 
mistake  from  which  the  author  before  us  warns  us  off. 
That  mistake,  we  gather  from  her  warning,  would  be 
to  encourage,  after  all,  any  considerable  lowering  of 
the  level  of  our  precious  fund  of  reserve.  When  we 
come  to  analyse  we  arrive  at  a  final  impression  of  what 
we  pay,  as  lovers  of  the  novel,  for  such  a  chartered 
state  as  we  have  here  a  glimpse  of;  and  we  find  it  to 
be  an  exposure,  on  the  intervention  at  least  of  such  a 
literary  temperament  as  the  one  before  us,  to  a  new 
kind  of  vulgarity.  We  have  surely  as  it  is  kinds 
enough.  The  absence  of  the  convention  throws  the 
writer  back  on  tact,  taste,  delicacy,  discretion,  sub- 
jecting these  principles  to  a  strain  from  which  the 
happy  office  of  its  presence  is,  in  a  considerable  degree 
and  for  performers  of  the  mere  usual  endowment,  to 
relieve  him.  When  we  have  not  a  very  fine  sense  the 
convention  appears  in  a  manner  to  have  it  on  our  be- 
half. And  how  frequent  to-day,  in  the  hurrying  herd 
of  brothers  and  sisters  of  the  pen,  is  a  fine  sense — of 
any  side  of  their  affair  ?  Do  we  not  approach  the 
truth  in  divining  that  only  an  eminent  individual  here 
and  there  may  be  trusted  for  it  ?  Here — for  the  case 
is  our  very  lesson — is  this  robust  and  wonderful  Serao 
who  is  yet  not  to  be  trusted  at  all.  Does  not  the  dim 
religious  light  with  which  we  surround  its  shrine  do 
more,  on  the  whole,  for  the  poetry  of  passione  than  the 
flood  of  flaring  gas  with  which,  in  her  pages,  and  at 
her  touch,  it  is  drenched  ?  Does  it  not  shrink,  as  a 
subject  under  treatment,  from  such  expert  recogni- 


MATILDE  SERAO  313 

tions  and  easy  discussions,  from  its  so  pitiless  reduc- 
tion to  the  category  of  the  familiar  ?  It  issues  from  the 
ordeal  with  the  aspect  with  which  it  might  escape 
from  a  noisy  family  party  or  alight  from  a  crowded 
omnibus.  It  is  at  the  category  of  the  familiar  that  vul- 
garity begins.  There  may  be  a  cool  virtue  therefore 
even  for  "art,"  and  an  appreciable  distinction  even  for 
truth,  in  the  grace  of  hanging  back  and  the  choice  of 
standing  off,  in  that  shade  of  the  superficial  which  we 
best  defend  by  simply  practising  it  in  season.  A  feel- 
ing revives  at  last,  after  a  timed  intermission,  that  we 
may  not  immediately  be  quite  able,  quite  assured 
enough,  to  name,  but  which,  gradually  clearing  up, 
soon  defines  itself  almost  as  a  yearning.  We  turn 
round  in  obedience  to  it — unmistakably  we  turn  round 
again  to  the  opposite  pole,  and  there  before  we  know  it 
have  positively  laid  a  clinging  hand  on  dear  old  Jane 
Austen. 


THE  NEW  NOVEL 
1914 

WE  feel  it  not  to  be  the  paradox  it  may  at  the  first 
blush  seem  that  the  state  of  the  novel  in  England  at 
the  present  time  is  virtually  very  much  the  state  of 
criticism  itself;  and  this  moreover,  at  the  risk  perhaps 
of  some  added  appearance  of  perverse  remark,  by  the 
very  reason  that  we  see  criticism  so  much  in  abeyance. 
So  far  as  we  miss  it  altogether  how  and  why  does  its 
"state"  matter,  and  why  and  how  can  it  or  should 
it,  as  an  absent  force,  enjoy  a  relation  to  that  constant 
renewal  of  our  supply  of  fiction  which  is  a  present  one 
so  far  as  a  force  at  all  ?  The  relation  is  this,  in  the 
fewest  words:  that  no  equal  outpouring  of  matter  into 
the  mould  of  literature,  or  what  roughly  passes  for 
such,  has  been  noted  to  live  its  life  and  maintain  its 
flood,  its  level  at  least  of  quantity  and  mass,  in  such 
free  and  easy  independence  of  critical  attention.  It 
constitutes  a  condition  and  a  perversity  on  the  part  of 
this  element  to  remain  irresponsive  before  an  appeal 
so  vociferous  at  least  and  so  incessant;  therefore  how 
can  such  a  neglect  of  occasions,  so  careless  a  habit  in 
spite  of  marked  openings,  be  better  described  than  as 
responsibility  declined  in  the  face  of  disorder  ?  The 
disorder  thus  determines  the  relation,  from  the  moment 
we  feel  that  it  might  be  less,  that  it  might  be  different, 
that  something  in  the  way  of  an  order  even  might  be 
disengaged  from  it  and  replace  it;  from  the  moment  in 
fact  that  the  low  critical  pitch  is  logically  reflected  in 

3M 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  315 

the  poetic  or,  less  pedantically  speaking,  the  improv- 
isational  at  large.  The  effect,  if  not  the  prime  office, 
of  criticism  is  to  make  our  absorption  and  our  enjoy- 
ment of  the  things  that  feed  the  mind  as  aware  of  itself 
as  possible,  since  that  awareness  quickens  the  mental 
demand,  which  thus  in  turn  wanders  further  and  fur- 
ther for  pasture.  This  action  on  the  part  of  the  mind 
practically  amounts  to  a  reaching  out  for  the  reasons 
of  its  interest,  as  only  by  its  so  ascertaining  them  can 
the  interest  grow  more  various.  This  is  the  very 
education  of  our  imaginative  life;  and  thanks  to  it  the 
general  question  of  how  to  refine,  and  of  why  certain 
things  refine  more  and  most,  on  that  happy  conscious- 
ness, becomes  for  us  of  the  last  importance.  Then 
we  cease  to  be  only  instinctive  and  at  the  mercy  of 
chance,  feeling  that  we  can  ourselves  take  a  hand  in 
our  satisfaction  and  provide  for  it,  making  ourselves 
safe  against  dearth,  and  through  the  door  opened  by 
that  perception  criticism  enters,  if  we  but  give  it  time, 
as  a  flood,  the  great  flood  of  awareness;  so  maintaining 
its  high  tide  unless  through  some  lapse  of  our  sense 
for  it,  some  flat  reversion  to  instinct  alone,  we  block  up 
the  ingress  and  sit  in  stale  and  shrinking  waters. 
Stupidity  may  arrest  any  current  and  fatuity  transcend 
any  privilege.  The  comfort  of  those  who  at  such  a 
time  consider  the  scene  may  be  a  little,  with  their 
curiosity  still  insistent,  to  survey  its  platitude  and 
record  the  exhibited  shrinkage;  which  amounts  to  the 
attempt  to  understand  how  stupidity  could  so  have 
prevailed.  We  take  it  here  that  the  answer  to  that 
inquiry  can  but  be  ever  the  same.  The  flood  of  "pro- 
duction" has  so  inordinately  exceeded  the  activity  of 
control  that  this  latter  anxious  agent,  first  alarmed  but 
then  indifferent,  has  been  forced  backward  out  of  the 


316  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

gate,  leaving  the  contents  of  the  reservoir  to  boil  and 
evaporate.  It  is  verily  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  gate 
that  we  just  now  seem  to  see  criticism  stand,  for  never 
was  the  reservoir  so  bubblingly  and  noisily  full,  at 
least  by  the  superficial  measure  of  life.  We  have 
caught  the  odd  accident  in  the  very  fact  of  its  occur- 
rence; we  have  seen  the  torrent  swell  by  extravagant 
cheap  contribution,  the  huge  increase  of  affluents 
turbid  and  unstrained.  Beyond  number  are  the  ways 
in  which  the  democratic  example,  once  gathering  mo- 
mentum, sets  its  mark  on  societies  and  seasons  that 
stand  in  its  course.  Nowhere  is  that  example  written 
larger,  to  our  perception,  than  in  "the  new  novel"; 
though  this,  we  hasten  to  add,  not  in  the  least  because 
prose  fiction  now  occupies  itself  as  never  before  with 
the  "condition  of  the  people,"  a  fact  quite  irrelevant 
to  the  nature  it  has  taken  on,  but  because  that  nature 
amounts  exactly  to  the  complacent  declaration  of  a 
common  literary  level,  a  repudiation  the  most  opera- 
tive even  if  the  least  reasoned  of  the  idea  of  differences, 
the  virtual  law,  as  we  may  call  it,  of  sorts  and  kinds, 
the  values  of  individual  quality  and  weight  in  the  pres- 
ence of  undiscriminated  quantity  and  rough-and-tum- 
ble "output" — these  attestations  made,  we  naturally 
mean,  in  the  air  of  composition  and  on  the  esthetic 
plane,  if  such  terms  have  still  an  attenuated  reference 
to  the  case  before  us.  With  which,  if  we  be  asked,  in 
the  light  of  that  generalisation,  whether  we  impute  to 
the  novel,  or  in  other  words  the  novelist,  all  the  stu- 
pidity against  which  the  spirit  of  appreciation  spends 
itself  in  vain,  we  reply  perforce  that  we  stop  short  of 
that,  it  being  too  obvious  that  of  an  exhibition  so  ster- 
ilised, so  void  of  all  force  and  suggestion,  there  would 
be  nothing  whatever  to  say.  Our  contention  is  exactly 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  317 

that,  in  spite  of  all  vain  aspects,  it  does  yet  present 
an  interest,  and  that  here  and  there  seem  written  on  it 
likelihoods  of  its  presenting  still  more — always  on  con- 
dition of  its  consenting  to  that  more  intimate  educa- 
tion which  is  precisely  what  democratised  movements 
look  most  askance  at.  It  strikes  us  as  not  too  much  to 
say  that  our  actual  view  of  the  practice  of  fiction  gives 
as  just  a  measure  as  could  be  desired  of  the  general, 
the  incurable  democratic  suspicion  of  the  selective  and 
comparative  principles  in  almost  any  application,  and 
the  tendency  therewith  to  regard,  and  above  all  to 
treat,  one  manner  of  book,  like  one  manner  of  person, 
as,  if  not  absolutely  as  good  as  another,  yet  good 
enough  for  any  democratic  use.  Criticism  reflects  con- 
tentiously  on  that  appearance,  though  it  be  an  appear- 
ance in  which  comfort  for  the  book  and  the  manner 
much  resides;  so  that  the  idea  prompting  these  re- 
marks of  our  own  is  that  the  comfort  may  be  deeply 
fallacious. 

I 

Still  not  to  let  go  of  our  imputation  of  interest  to 
some  part  at  least  of  what  is  happening  in  the  world 
of  production  in  this  kind,  we  may  say  that  non- 
selective  and  non-comparative  practice  appears  bent 
on  showing  us  all  it  can  do  and  how  far  or  to  what 
appointed  shores,  what  waiting  havens  and  inviting 
inlets,  the  current  that  is  mainly  made  a  current  by 
looseness,  by  want  of  observable  direction,  shall  suc- 
ceed in  carrying  it.  We  respond  to  any  sign  of  an  in- 
telligent view  or  even  of  a  lively  instinct — which  is 
why  we  give  the  appearance  so  noted  the  benefit  of 
every  presumption  as  to  its  life  and  health.  It  may 
be  that  the  dim  sense  is  livelier  than  the  presentable 


318  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

reason,  but  even  that  is  no  graceless  fact  for  us,  espe- 
cially when  the  keenness  of  young  curiosity  and  energy 
is  betrayed  in  its  pace,  and  betrayed,  for  that  matter, 
in  no  small  abundance  and  variety.  The  new  or  at 
least  the  young  novel  is  up  and  doing,  clearly,  with  the 
best  faith  and  the  highest  spirits  in  the  world;  if  we 
but  extend  a  little  our  measure  of  youth  indeed,  as  we 
are  happily  more  and  more  disposed  to,  we  may  speak 
of  it  as  already  chin-deep  in  trophies.  The  men  who 
are  not  so  young  as  the  youngest  were  but  the  other 
day  very  little  older  than  these:  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad, 
Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett  and  Mr.  Galsworthy,  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  have  not  quite  perhaps 
the  early  bloom  of  Mr.  Hugh  Walpole,  Mr.  Gilbert 
Cannan,  Mr.  Compton  Mackenzie  and  Mr.  D.  H. 
Lawrence,  but  the  spring  unrelaxed  is  still,  to  our  per-" 
ception,  in  their  step,  and  we  see  two  or  three  of  them 
sufficiently  related  to  the  still  newer  generation  in  a 
quasi-parental  way  to  make  our  whole  enumeration 
as  illustrational  as  we  need  it.  Mr.  Wells  and  Mr. 
Arnold  Bennett  have  their  strongest  mark,  the  aspect 
by  which  we  may  most  classify  them,  in  common- 
even  if  their  three  named  contemporaries  are  doubtless 
most  interesting  in  one  of  the  connections  we  are  not 
now  seeking  to  make.  The  author  of  "Tono-Bungay" 
and  of  "The  New  Machiavelli,"  and  the  author  of 
"The  Old  Wives'  Tale"  and  of  "Clayhanger,"  have 
practically  launched  the  boat  in  which  we  admire  the 
fresh  play  of  oar  of  the  author  of  "The  Duchess  of 
Wrexe,"  and  the  documented  aspect  exhibited  suc- 
cessively by  "Round  the  Corner,"  by  "Carnival"  and 
"Sinister  Street,"  and  even  by  "Sons  and  Lovers" 
(however  much  we  may  find  Mr.  Lawrence,  we  con- 
fess, hang  in  the  dusty  rear).  We  shall  explain  in  a 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  319 

moment  what  we  mean  by  this  designation  of  the  ele- 
ment that  these  best  of  the  younger  men  strike  us  as 
more  particularly  sharing,  our  point  being  provision- 
ally that  Mr.  Wells  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  (speaking 
now  only  of  them)  began  some  time  back  to  show  us, 
and  to  show  sundry  emulous  and  generous  young 
spirits  then  in  the  act  of  more  or  less  waking  up,  what 
the  state  in  question  might  amount  to.  We  confound 
the  author  of  "Tono-Bungay"  and  the  author  of 
"Clayhanger"  in  this  imputation  for  the  simple  reason 
that  with  the  sharpest  differences  of  character  and 
range  they  yet  come  together  under  our  so  convenient 
measure  of  value  by  saturation.  This  is  the  greatest 
value,  to  our  sense,  in  either  of  them,  their  other 
values,  even  when  at  the  highest,  not  being  quite  in 
proportion  to  it;  and  as  to  be  saturated  is  to  be  docu- 
mented, to  be  able  even  on  occasion  to  prove  quite 
enviably  and  potently  so,  they  are  alike  in  the  authority 
that  creates  emulation.  It  little  signifies  that  Mr. 
Wells's  documented  or  saturated  state  in  respect  to  a 
particular  matter  in  hand  is  but  one  of  the  faces  of  his 
generally  informed  condition,  of  his  extraordinary  mass 
of  gathered  and  assimilated  knowledge,  a  miscella- 
neous collection  more  remarkable  surely  than  any  teller 
of  "mere"  tales,  with  the  possible  exception  of  Balzac, 
has  been  able  to  draw  upon,  whereas  Mr.  Arnold 
Bennett's  corresponding  provision  affects  us  as,  though 
singularly  copious,  special,  exclusive  and  artfully 
economic.  This  distinction  avails  nothing  against 
that  happy  fact  of  the  handiest  possession  by  Mr. 
Wells  of  immeasurably  more  concrete  material,  ame- 
nable for  straight  and  vivid  reference,  convertible  into 
apt  illustration,  than  we  should  know  where  to  look 
for  other  examples  of.  The  author  of  "The  New 


320  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Machiavelli"  knows,  somehow,  to  our  mystified  and 
dazzled  apprehension,  because  he  writes  and  because 
that  act  constitutes  for  him  the  need,  on  occasion  a 
most  desperate,  of  absorbing  knowledge  at  the  pores; 
the  chronicler  of  the  Five  Towns  writing  so  much  more 
discernibly,  on  the  other  hand,  because  he  knows,  and 
conscious  of  no  need  more  desperate  than  that  par- 
ticular circle  of  civilisation  may  satisfy. 

Our  argument  is  that  each  is  ideally  immersed  in 
his  own  body  of  reference,  and  that  immersion  in  any 
such  degree  and  to  the  effect  of  any  such  variety,  in- 
tensity and  plausibility  is  really  among  us  a  new  fea- 
ture of  the  novelist's  range  of  resource.  We  have  seen 
him,  we  have  even  seen  her,  otherwise  auspiciously  en- 
dowed, seen  him  observant,  impassioned,  inspired,  and 
in  virtue  of  these  things  often  very  charming,  very 
interesting,  very  triumphant,  visibly  qualified  for  the 
highest  distinction  before  the  fact  and  visibly  crowned 
by  the  same  after  it — we  have  seen  him  with  a  great 
imagination  and  a  great  sense  of  life,  we  have  seen  him 
even  with  a  great  sense  of  expression  and  a  considerable 
sense  of  art :  so  that  we  have  only  to  reascend  the  stream 
of  our  comparatively  recent  literature  to  meet  him 
serene  and  immortal,  brow-bound  with  the  bay  and 
erect  on  his  particular  pedestal.  We  have  only  to 
do  that,  but  have  only  also,  while  we  do  it,  to  recog- 
nise that  meantime  other  things  still  than  these  various 
apotheoses  have  taken  place,  and  that,  to  the  increase 
of  our  recreation,  and  even  if  our  limited  space  con- 
demns us  to  put  the  matter  a  trifle  clumsily,  a  change 
has  come  over  our  general  receptive  sensibility  not 
less  than  over  our  productive  tradition.  In  these  con- 
nections, we  admit,  overstatement  is  easy  and  over- 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  321 

emphasis  tempting;  we  confess  furthermore  to  a 
frank  desire  to  enrich  the  case,  the  historic,  with  all 
the  meaning  we  can  stuff  into  it.  So  viewed  accord- 
ingly it  gives  us  the  "new,"  to  repeat  our  expression, 
as  an  appetite  for  a  closer  notation,  a  sharper  spec- 
ification of  the  signs  of  life,  of  consciousness,  of  the 
human  scene  and  the  human  subject  in  general,  than 
the  three  or  four  generations  before  us  had  been  at  all 
moved  to  insist  on.  They  had  insisted  indeed,  these 
generations,  we  see  as  we  look  back  to  them,  on  almost 
nothing  whatever;  what  was  to  come  to  them  had 
come,  in  enormous  affluence  and  freshness  at  its  best, 
and  to  our  continued  appreciation  as  well  as  to  the 
honour  of  their  sweet  susceptibility,  because  again  and 
again  the  great  miracle  of  genius  took  place,  while  they 
gaped,  in  their  social  and  sentimental  sky.  For  our- 
selves that  miracle  has  not  been  markedly  renewed, 
but  it  has  none  the  less  happened  that  by  hook  and  by 
crook  the  case  for  appreciation  remains  interesting. 
The  great  thing  that  saves  it,  under  the  drawback  we 
have  named,  is,  no  doubt,  that  we  have  simply — always 
for  appreciation — learned  a  little  to  insist,  and  that  we 
thus  get  back  on  one  hand  something  of  what  we  have 
lost  on  the  other.  We  are  unable  of  course,  with 
whatever  habit  of  presumption  engendered,  to  insist 
upon  genius;  so  that  who  shall  describe  the  measure 
of  success  we  still  achieve  as  not  virtually  the  search 
for  freshness,  and  above  all  for  closeness,  in  quite  a 
different  direction  ?  To  this  nearer  view  of  commoner 
things  Mr.  Wells,  say,  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  and 
in  their  degree,  under  the  infection  communicated, 
Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence  and  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  and  Mr. 
Compton  Mackenzie  and  Mr.  Hugh  Walpole,  strike 
us  as  having  all  gathered  themselves  up  with  a  move- 


322  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

ment  never  yet  undertaken  on  our  literary  scene,  and, 
beyond  anything  else,  with  an  instinctive  divination 
of  what  had  most  waved  their  predecessors  off  it. 
What  had  this  lion  in  the  path  been,  we  make  them 
out  as  after  a  fashion  asking  themselves,  what  had  it 
been  from  far  back  and  straight  down  through  all  the 
Victorian  time,  but  the  fond  superstition  that  the  key 
of  the  situation,  of  each  and  every  situation  that  could 
turn  up  for  the  novelist,  was  the  sentimental  key,  which 
might  fit  into  no  door  or  window  opening  on  closeness 
or  on  freshness  at  all  ?  Was  it  not  for  all  the  world 
as  if  even  the  brightest  practitioners  of  the  past,  those 
we  now  distinguish  as  saved  for  glory  in  spite  of  them- 
selves, had  been  as  sentimental  as  they  could,  or,  to 
give  the  trick  another  name,  as  romantic  and  thereby 
as  shamelessly  "dodgy"  ? — just  in  order  not  to  be  close 
and  fresh,  not  to  be  authentic,  as  that  takes  trouble, 
takes  talent,  and  you  can  be  sentimental,  ypu  can  be 
romantic,  you  can  be  dodgy,  alas,  not  a  bit  less  on  the 
footing  of  genius  than  on  the  footing  of  mediocrity  or 
even  of  imbecility  ?  Was  it  not  as  if  the  sentimental 
had  been  more  and  more  noted  as  but  another  name 
for  the  romantic,  if  not  indeed  the  romantic  as  but 
another  name  for  the  sentimental,  and  as  if  these 
things,  whether  separate  or  united,  had  been  in  the 
same  degree  recognised  as  unamenable,  or  at  any  rate 
unfavourable,  to  any  consistent  fineness  of  notation, 
once  the  tide  of  the  copious  as  a  condition  of  the 
thorough  had  fairly  set  in  ? 

So,  to  express  it  briefly,  the  possibility  of  hugging 
the  shore  of  the  real  as  it  had  not,  among  us,  been 
hugged,  and  of  pushing  inland,  as  far  as  a  keel  might 
float,  wherever  the  least  opening  seemed  to  smile, 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  323 

dawned  upon  a  few  votaries  and  gathered  further  con- 
fidence with  exercise.  Who  could  say,  of  course,  that 
Jane  Austen  had  not  been  close,  just  as  who  could  ask 
if  Anthony  Trollope  had  not  been  copious  ? — just  as 
who  could  not  say  that  it  all  depended  on  what  was 
meant  by  these  terms  ?  The  demonstration  of  what 
was  meant,  it  presently  appeared,  could  come  but 
little  by  little,  quite  as  if  each  tentative  adventurer 
had  rather  anxiously  to  learn  for  himself  what  might 
be  meant — this  failing  at  least  the  leap  into  the  arena 
of  some  great  demonstrative,  some  sudden  athletic 
and  epoch-making  authority.  Who  could  pretend  that 
Dickens  was  anything  but  romantic,  and  even  more 
romantic  in  his  humour,  if  possible,  than  in  pathos  or 
in  queer  perfunctory  practice  of  the  "plot"?  Who 
could  pretend  that  Jane  Austen  didn't  leave  much 
more  untold  than  told  about  the  aspects  and  manners 
even  of  the  confined  circle  in  which  her  muse  revolved  ? 
Why  shouldn't  it  be  argued  against  her  that  where  her 
testimony  complacently  ends  the  pressure  of  appetite 
within  us  presumes  exactly  to  begin  ?  Who  could 
pretend  that  the  reality  of  Trollope  didn't  owe  much 
of  its  abundance  to  the  diluted,  the  quite  extrav- 
agantly watered  strain,  no  less  than  to  the  heavy  hand, 
in  which  it  continued  to  be  ladled  out  ?  Who  of  the 
younger  persuasion  would  not  have  been  ready  to  cite, 
as  one  of  the  liveliest  opportunities  for  the  critic  eager 
to  see  representation  searching,  such  a  claim  for  the 
close  as  Thackeray's  sighing  and  protesting  "look-in" 
at  the  acquaintance  between  Arthur  Pendennis  and 
Fanny  Bolton,  the  daughter  of  the  Temple  laundress, 
amid  the  purlieus  of  that  settlement  ?  The  sentimen- 
tal habit  and  the  spirit  of  romance,  it  was  unmistakably 
chargeable,  stood  out  to  sea  as  far  as  possible  the 


324  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

moment  the  shore  appeared  to  offer  the  least  difficulty 
to  hugging,  and  the  Victorian  age  bristled  with  perfect 
occasions  for  our  catching  them  in  the  act  of  this 
showy  retreat.  All  revolutions  have  been  prepared  in 
spite  of  their  often  striking  us  as  sudden,  and  so  it  was 
doubtless  that  when  scarce  longer  ago  than  the  other 
day  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  had  the  fortune  to  lay  his 
hand  on  a  general  scene  and  a  cluster  of  agents  deficient 
to  a  peculiar  degree  in  properties  that  might  interfere 
with  a  desirable  density  of  illustration — deficient,  that 
is,  in  such  connections  as  might  carry  the  imagination 
off  to  some  sport  on  its  own  account — we  recognised 
at  once  a  set  of  conditions  auspicious  to  the  newer  kind 
of  appeal.  Let  us  confess  that  we  were  at  the  same 
time  doubtless  to  master  no  better  way  of  describing 
these  conditions  than  by  the  remark  that  they  were, 
for  some  reason  beautifully  inherent  in  them,  suscep- 
tible at  once  of  being  entirely  known  and  of  seeming 
delectably  thick.  Reduction  to  exploitable  knowl- 
edge is  apt  to  mean  for  many  a  case  of  the  human  com- 
plexity reduction  to  comparative  thinness;  and  noth- 
ing was  thereby  at  the  first  blush  to  interest  us  more 
than  the  fact  that  the  air  and  the  very  smell  of  packed 
actuality  in  the  subject-matter  of  such  things  as  the 
author's  two  longest  works  was  clearly  but  another 
name  for  his  personal  competence  in  that  matter,  the 
fulness  and  firmness  of  his  embrace  of  it.  This  was  a 
fresh  and  beguiling  impression — that  the  state  of  inor- 
dinate possession  on  the  chronicler's  part,  the  mere 
state  as  such  and  as  an  energy  directly  displayed,  was 
the  interest,  neither  more  nor  less,  was  the  sense  and  the 
meaning  and  the  picture  and  the  drama,  all  so  suf- 
ficiently constituting  them  that  it  scarce  mattered  what 
they  were  in  themselves.  Of  what  they  were  in  them- 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  325 

selves  their  being  in  Mr.  Bennett,  as  Mr.  Bennett  to 
such  a  tune  harboured  them,  represented  their  one 
conceivable  account — not  to  mention,  as  reinforcing 
this,  our  own  great  comfort  and  relief  when  certain 
high  questions  and  wonderments  about  them,  or  about 
our  mystified  relation  to  them,  began  one  after  an- 
other to  come  up. 

Because  such  questions  did  come,  we  must  at  once 
declare,  and  we  are  still  in  presence  of  them,  for  all 
the  world  as  if  that  case  of  the  perfect  harmony,  the 
harmony  between  subject  and  author,  were  just  marked 
with  a  flaw  and  didn't  meet  the  whole  assault  of  rest- 
less criticism.  What  we  make  out  Mr.  Bennett  as 
doing  is  simply  recording  his  possession  or,  to  put  it 
more  completely,  his  saturation;  and  to  see  him  as 
virtually  shut  up  to  that  process  is  a  note  of  all  the 
more  moment  that  we  see  our  selected  cluster  of  his 
interesting  juniors,  and  whether  by  his  direct  action 
on  their  collective  impulse  or  not,  embroiled,  as  we 
venture  to  call  it,  in  the  same  predicament.  The  act 
of  squeezing  out  to  the  utmost  the  plump  and  more  or 
less  juicy  orange  of  a  particular  acquainted  state  and 
letting  this  affirmation  of  energy,  however  directed  or 
undirected,  constitute  for  them  the  "treatment"  of  a 
theme — that  is  what  we  remark  them  as  mainly  en- 
gaged in,  after  remarking  the  example  so  strikingly,  so 
originally  set,  even  if  an  undue  subjection  to  it  be  here 
and  there  repudiated.  Nothing  is  further  from  our 
thought  than  to  undervalue  saturation  and  possession, 
the  fact  of  the  particular  experience,  the  state  and 
degree  of  acquaintance  incurred,  however  such  a  con- 
sciousness may  have  been  determined;  for  these  things 
represent  on  the  part  of  the  novelist,  as  on  the  part  of 


326  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

any  painter  of  things  seen,  felt  or  imagined,  just  one 
half  of  his  authority — the  other  half  being  represented 
of  course  by  the  application  he  is  inspired  to  make  of 
them.  Therefore  that  fine  secured  half  is  so  much 
gained  at  the  start,  and  the  fact  of  its  brightly  being 
there  may  really  by  itself  project  upon  the  course  so 
much  colour  and  form  as  to  make  us  on  occasion,  under 
the  genial  force,  almost  not  miss  the  answer  to  the 
question  of  application.  When  the  author  of  "Clay- 
hanger"  has  put  down  upon  the  table,  in  dense  un- 
confused  array,  every  fact  required,  every  fact  in  any 
way  invocable,  to  make  the  life  of  the  Five  Towns 
press  upon  us,  and  to  make  our  sense  of  it,  so  full-fed, 
content  us,  we  may  very  well  go  on  for  the  time  in  the 
captive  condition,  the  beguiled  and  bemused  condi- 
tion, the  acknowledgment  of  which  is  in  general  our 
highest  tribute  to  the  temporary  master  of  our  sen- 
sibility. Nothing  at  such  moments — or  rather  at  the 
end  of  them,  when  the  end  begins  to  threaten — may 
be  of  a  more  curious  strain  than  the  dawning  unrest 
that  suggests  to  us  fairly  our  first  critical  comment: 
"Yes,  yes — but  is  this  all?  These  are  the  circum- 
stances of  the  interest — we  see,  we  see;  but  where 
is  the  interest  itself,  where  and  what  is  its  centre, 
and  how  are  we  to  measure  it  in  relation  to  that?" 
Of  course  we  may  in  the  act  of  exhaling  that  plaint 
(which  we  have  just  expressed  at  its  mildest)  well 
remember  how  many  people  there  are  to  tell  us  that 
to  "measure"  an  interest  is  none  of  our  affair;  that 
we  have  but  to  take  it  on  the  cheapest  and  easiest 
terms  and  be  thankful;  and  that  if  by  our  very  con- 
fession we  have  been  led  the  imaginative  dance  the 
music  has  done  for  us  all  it  pretends  to.  Which  words, 
however,  have  only  to  happen  to  be  for  us  the  most 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  327 

unintelligent  conceivable  not  in  the  least  to  arrest  our 
wonderment  as  to  where  our  bedrenched  consciousness 
may  still  not  awkwardly  leave  us  for  the  pleasure  of 
appreciation.  That  appreciation  is  also  a  mistake 
and  a  priggishness,  being  reflective  and  thereby  corro- 
sive, is  another  of  the  fond  dicta  which  we  are  here 
concerned  but  to  brush  aside — the  more  closely  to 
embrace  the  welcome  induction  that  appreciation,  at- 
tentive and  reflective,  inquisitive  and  conclusive,  is 
in  this  connection  absolutely  the  golden  key  to  our 
pleasure.  The  more  it  plays  up,  the  more  we  recognise 
and  are  able  to  number  the  sources  of  our  enjoyment, 
the  greater  the  provision  made  for  security  in  that 
attitude,  which  corresponds,  by  the  same  stroke,  with 
the  reduced  danger  of  waste  in  the  undertaking  to 
amuse  us.  It  all  comes  back  to  our  amusement,  and 
to  the  noblest  surely,  on  the  whole,  we  know;  and  it 
is  in  the  very  nature  of  clinging  appreciation  not  to 
sacrifice  consentingly  a  single  shade  of  the  art  that 
makes  for  that  blessing.  From  this  solicitude  spring 
our  questions,  and  not  least  the  one  to  which  we  give 
ourselves  for  the  moment  here — this  moment  of  our 
being  regaled  as  never  yet  with  the  fruits  of  the  move- 
ment (if  the  name  be  not  of  too  pompous  an  applica- 
tion where  the  flush  and  the  heat  of  accident  too  seem 
so  candidly  to  look  forth),  in  favour  of  the  "expression 
of  life"  in  terms  as  loose  as  may  pretend  to  an  effect 
of  expression  at  all.  The  relegation  of  terms  to  the 
limbo  of  delusions  outlived  so  far  as  ever  really  cul- 
tivated becomes  of  necessity,  it  will  be  plain,  the  great 
mark  of  the  faith  that  for  the  novelist  to  show  he 
"knows  all  about"  a  certain  congeries  of  aspects,  the 
more  numerous  within  their  mixed  circle  the  better, 
is  thereby  to  set  in  motion,  with  due  intensity,  the  pre- 


328  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

tension  to  interest.  The  state  of  knowing  all  about 
whatever  it  may  be  has  thus  only  to  become  con- 
sistently and  abundantly  active  to  pass  for  his  supreme 
function;  and  to  its  so  becoming  active  few  difficulties 
appear  to  be  descried — so  great  may  on  occasion  be 
the  mere  excitement  of  activity.  To  the  fact  that  the 
exhilaration  is,  as  we  have  hinted,  often  infectious,  to 
this  and  to  the  charming  young  good  faith  and  general 
acclamation  under  which  each  case  appears  to  proceed 
— each  case  we  of  course  mean  really  repaying  atten- 
tion— the  critical  reader  owes  his  opportunity  so  con- 
siderably and  so  gratefully  to  generalise. 

II 

We  should  have  only  to  remount  the  current  with  a 
certain  energy  to  come  straight  up  against  Tolstoy 
as  the  great  illustrative  master-hand  on  all  this  ground 
of  the  disconnection  of  method  from  matter — which 
encounter,  however,  would  take  us  much  too  far,  so 
that  we  must  for  the  present  but  hang  off  from  it  with 
the  remark  that  of  all  great  painters  of  the  social  pic- 
ture it  was  given  that  epic  genius  most  to  serve  admi- 
rably as  a  rash  adventurer  and  a  "caution,"  and  ex- 
ecrably, pestilentially,  as  a  model.  In  this  strange 
union  of  relations  he  stands  alone:  from  no  other  great 
projector  of  the  human  image  and  the  human  idea  is 
so  much  truth  to  be  extracted  under  an  equal  leakage 
of  its  value.  All  the  proportions  in  him  are  so  much 
the  largest  that  the  drop  of  attention  to  our  nearer 
cases  might  by  its  violence  leave  little  of  that  principle 
alive;  which  fact  need  not  disguise  from  us,  none  the 
less,  that  as  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett, 
to  return  to  them  briefly  again,  derive,  by  multiplied  if 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  329 

diluted  transmissions,  from  the  great  Russian  (from 
whose  all  but  equal  companion  Turgenieff  we  recog- 
nise no  derivatives  at  all),  so,  observing  the  distances, 
we  may  profitably  detect  an  unexhausted  influence  in 
our  minor,  our  still  considerably  less  rounded  vessels. 
Highly  attaching  as  indeed  the  game  might  be,  of  in- 
quiring as  to  the  centre  of  the  interest  or  the  sense  of 
the  whole  in  "The  Passionate  Friends,"  or  in  "The 
Old  Wives'  Tale,"  after  having  sought  those  luxuries 
in  vain  not  only  through  the  general  length  and  breadth 
of  "War  and  Peace,"  but  within  the  quite  respectable 
confines  of  any  one  of  the  units  of  effect  there  clustered : 
this  as  preparing  us  to  address  a  like  friendly  challenge 
to  Mr.  Cannan's  "Round  the  Corner,"  say,  or  to  Mr. 
Lawrence's  "Sons  and  Lovers" — should  we  wish  to  be 
very  friendly  to  Mr.  Lawrence — or  to  Mr.  Hugh  Wai- 
pole's  "Duchess  of  Wrexe,"  or  even  to  Mr.  Compton 
Mackenzie's  "Sinister  Street"  and  "Carnival,"  dis- 
cernibly,  we  hasten  to  add,  though  certain  betrayals 
of  a  controlling  idea  and  a  pointed  intention  do  com- 
paratively gleam  out  of  the  two  fictions  last  named. 
"The  Old  Wives'  Tale"  is  the  history  of  two  sisters, 
daughters  of  a  prosperous  draper  in  a  Staffordshire 
town,  who,  separating  early  in  life,  through  the  flight 
of  one  of  them  to  Paris  with  an  ill-chosen  husband  and 
the  confirmed  and  prolonged  local  pitch  of  the  career 
of  the  other,  are  reunited  late  in  life  by  the  return  of 
the  fugitive  after  much  Parisian  experience  and  by  her 
pacified  acceptance  of  the  conditions  of  her  birthplace. 
The  divided  current  flows  together  again,  and  the 
chronicle  closes  with  the  simple  drying  up  determined 
by  the  death  of  the  sisters.  That  is  all;  the  canvas  is 
covered,  ever  so  closely  and  vividly  covered,  by  the 
exhibition  of  innumerable  small  facts  and  aspects,  at 


330  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

which  we  assist  with  the  most  comfortable  sense  of 
their  substantial  truth.  The  sisters,  and  more  par- 
ticularly the  less  adventurous,  are  at  home  in  their 
author's  mind,  they  sit  and  move  at  their  ease  in  the 
square  chamber  of  his  attention,  to  a  degree  beyond 
which  the  production  of  that  ideal  harmony  between 
creature  and  creator  could  scarcely  go,  and  all  by  an 
art  of  demonstration  so  familiar  and  so  "quiet"  that 
the  truth  and  the  poetry,  to  use  Goethe's  distinction, 
melt  utterly  together  and  we  see  no  difference  between 
the  subject  of  the  show  and  the  showman's  feeling, 
let  alone  the  showman's  manner,  about  it.  This  felt 
identity  of  the  elements — because  we  at  least  con- 
sciously feel — becomes  in  the  novel  we  refer  to,  and  not 
less  in  "Clayhanger,"  which  our  words  equally  de- 
scribe, a  source  for  us  of  abject  confidence,  confidence 
truly  so  abject  in  the  solidity  of  every  appearance 
that  it  may  be  said  to  represent  our  whole  relation 
to  the  work  and  completely  to  exhaust  our  reaction 
upon  it.  "Clayhanger,"  of  the  two  fictions  even  the 
more  densely  loaded  with  all  the  evidence  in  what  we 
should  call  the  case  presented  did  we  but  learn  mean- 
while for  what  case,  or  for  a  case  of  what,  to  take  it, 
inscribes  the  annals,  the  private  more  particularly, 
of  a  provincial  printer  in  a  considerable  way  of  bus- 
iness, beginning  with  his  early  boyhood  and  going  on 
to  the  complications  of  his  maturity — these  not  ex- 
hausted with  our  present  possession  of  the  record, 
inasmuch  as  by  the  author's  announcement  there  is 
more  of  the  catalogue  to  come.  This  most  monumen- 
tal of  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett's  recitals,  taking  it  with  its 
supplement  of  "Hilda  Lessways,"  already  before  us, 
is  so  describable  through  its  being  a  monument  exactly 
not  to  an  idea,  a  pursued  and  captured  meaning,  or  in 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  331 

short  to  anything  whatever,  but  just  simply  of  the 
quarried  and  gathered  material  it  happens  to  contain, 
the  stones  and  bricks  and  rubble  and  cement  and  pro- 
miscuous constituents  of  every  sort  that  have  been 
heaped  in  it  and  thanks  to  which  it  quite  massively 
piles  itself  up.  Our  perusal  and  our  enjoyment  are 
our  watching  of  the  growth  of  the  pile  and  of  the 
capacity,  industry,  energy  with  which  the  operation  is 
directed.  A  huge  and  in  its  way  a  varied  aggregation, 
without  traceable  lines,  divinable  direction,  effect  of 
composition,  the  mere  number  of  its  pieces,  the  great 
dump  of  its  material,  together  with  the  fact  that  here 
and  there  in  the  miscellany,  as  with  the  value  of  bits 
of  marble  or  porphyry,  fine  elements  shine  out,  it 
keeps  us  standing  and  waiting  to  the  end — and  largely 
just  because  it  keeps  us  wondering.  We  surely  wonder 
more  what  it  may  all  propose  to  mean  than  any  equal 
appearance  of  preparation  to  relieve  us  of  that  strain, 
any  so  founded  and  grounded  a  postponement  of  the 
disclosure  of  a  sense  in  store,  has  for  a  long  time  called 
upon  us  to  do  in  a  like  connection.  A  great  thing  it  is 
assuredly  that  while  we  wait  and  wonder  we  are  amused 
— were  it  not  for  that,  truly,  our  situation  would  be 
thankless  enough;  we  may  ask  ourselves,  as  has 
already  been  noted,  why  on  such  ambiguous  terms  we 
should  consent  to  be,  and  why  the  practice  doesn't  at 
a  given  moment  break  down;  and  our  answer  brings 
us  back  to  that  many-fingered  grasp  of  the  orange  that 
the  author  squeezes.  This  particular  orange  is  of  the 
largest  and  most  rotund,  and  his  trust  in  the  consequent 
flow  is  of  its  nature  communicative.  Such  is  the  case 
always,  and  most  naturally,  with  that  air  in  a  person 
who  has  something,  who  at  the  very  least  has  much  to 
tell  us:  we  like  so  to  be  affected  by  it,  we  meet  it  half 


332  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

way  and  lend  ourselves,  sinking  in  up  to  the  chin. 
Up  to  the  chin  only  indeed,  beyond  doubt;  we  even 
then  feel  our  head  emerge,  for  judgment  and  articulate 
question,  and  it  is  from  that  position  that  we  remind 
ourselves  how  the  real  reward  of  our  patience  is  still 
to  come — the  reward  attending  not  at  all  the  imme- 
diate sense  of  immersion,  but  reserved  for  the  after- 
sense,  which  is  a  very  different  matter,  whether  in 
the  form  of  a  glow  or  of  a  chill. 

If  Mr.  Bennett's  tight  rotundity  then  is  of  the  hand- 
somest size  and  his  manipulation  of  it  so  firm,  what  are 
we  to  say  of  Mr.  Wells's,  who,  a  novelist  very  much 
as  Lord  Bacon  was  a  philosopher,  affects  us  as  taking 
all  knowledge  for  his  province  and  as  inspiring  in  us 
to  the  very  highest  degree  the  confidence  enjoyed  by 
himself — enjoyed,  we  feel,  with  a  breadth  with  which 
it  has  been  given  no  one  of  his  fellow-craftsmen  to 
enjoy  anything.  If  confidence  alone  could  lead  utterly 
captive  we  should  all  be  huddled  in  a  bunch  at  Mr. 
Wells's  heels — which  is  indeed  where  we  are  abjectly 
gathered  so  far  as  that  force  does  operate.  It  is  lit- 
erally Mr.  Wells's  own  mind,  and  the  experience  of  his 
own  mind,  incessant  and  extraordinarily  various,  ex- 
traordinarily reflective,  even  with  all  sorts  of  condi- 
tions made,  of  whatever  he  may  expose  it  to,  that  forms 
the  reservoir  tapped  by  him,  that  constitutes  his  pro- 
vision of  grounds  of  interest.  It  is,  by  our  thinking, 
in  his  power  to  name  to  us,  as  a  preliminary,  more  of 
these  grounds  than  all  his  contemporaries  put  together, 
and  even  to  exceed  any  competitor,  without  exception, 
in  the  way  of  suggesting  that,  thick  as  he  may  seem 
to  lay  them,  they  remain  yet  only  contributive,  are 
not  in  themselves  full  expression  but  are  designed 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  333 

strictly  to  subserve  it,  that  this  extraordinary  writer's 
spell  resides.  When  full  expression,  the  expression  of 
some  particular  truth,  seemed  to  lapse  in  this  or  that 
of  his  earlier  novels  (we  speak  not  here  of  his  shorter 
things,  for  the  most  part  delightfully  wanton  and  ex- 
empt,) it  was  but  by  a  hand's  breadth,  so  that  if  we 
didn't  inveterately  quite  know  what  he  intended  we 
yet  always  felt  sufficiently  that  he  knew.  The  par- 
ticular intentions  of  such  matters  as  "Kipps,"  as 
"Tono-Bungay,"  as  "Ann  Veronica,"  so  swarmed 
about  us,  in  their  blinding,  bluffing  vivacity,  that  the 
mere  sum  of  them  might  have  been  taken  for  a  sense 
over  and  above  which  it  was  graceless  to  inquire.  The 
more  this  author  learns  and  learns,  or  at  any  rate  knows 
and  knows,  however,  the  greater  is  this  impression  of 
his  holding  it  good  enough  for  us,  such  as  we  are,  that 
he  shall  but  turn  out  his  mind  and  its  contents  upon  us 
by  any  free  familiar  gesture  and  as  from  a  high  window 
forever  open — an  entertainment  as  copious  surely  as 
any  occasion  should  demand,  at  least  till  we  have  more 
intelligibly  expressed  our  title  to  a  better.  Such  things 
as  "The  New  Machiavelli,"  "Marriage,"  "The  Pas- 
sionate Friends,"  are  so  very  much  more  attestations 
of  the  presence  of  material  than  attestations  of  an 
interest  in  the  use  of  it  that  we  ask  ourselves  again 
and  again  why  so  fondly  neglected  a  state  of  leakage 
comes  not  to  be  fatal  to  any  provision  of  quantity, 
or  even  to  stores  more  specially  selected  for  the  ordeal 
than  Mr.  Wells's  always  strike  us  as  being.  Is  not 
the  pang  of  witnessed  waste  in  fact  great  just  in  pro- 
portion as  we  are  touched  by  our  author's  fine  ofF- 
handedness  as  to  the  value  of  the  stores,  about  which 
he  can  for  the  time  make  us  believe  what  he  will  ?  so 
that,  to  take  an  example  susceptible  of  brief  statement, 


334  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

we  wince  at  a  certain  quite  peculiarly  gratuitous  sac- 
rifice to  the  casual  in  "Marriage"  very  much  as  at 
seeing  some  fine  and  indispensable  little  part  of  a 
mechanism  slip  through  profane  fingers  and  lose  it- 
self. Who  does  not  remember  what  ensues  after  a 
little  upon  the  aviational  descent  of  the  hero  of  the 
fiction  just  named  into  the  garden  occupied,  in  com- 
pany with  her  parents,  by  the  young  lady  with  whom 
he  is  to  fall  in  love  ? — and  this  even  though  the  whole 
opening  scene  so  constituted,  with  all  the  comedy  hares 
its  function  appears  to  be  to  start,  remains  with  its 
back  squarely  turned,  esthetically  speaking,  to  the 
quarter  in  which  the  picture  develops.  The  point  for 
our  mortification  is  that  by  one  of  the  first  steps  in  this 
development,  the  first  impression  on  him  having  been 
made,  the  hero  accidentally  meets  the  heroine,  of  a 
summer  eventide,  in  a  leafy  lane  which  supplies  them 
with  the  happiest  occasion  to  pursue  their  acquaintance 
— or  in  other  words  supplies  the  author  with  the 
liveliest  consciousness  (as  we  at  least  feel  it  should  have 
been)  that  just  so  the  relation  between  the  pair,  its 
seed  already  sown  and  the  fact  of  that  bringing  about 
all  that  is  still  to  come,  pushes  aside  whatever  veil  and 
steps  forth  into  life.  To  show  it  step  forth  and  affirm 
itself  as  a  relation,  what  is  this  but  the  interesting 
function  of  the  whole  passage,  on  the  performance  of 
which  what  follows  is  to  hang  ? — and  yet  who  can  say 
that  when  the  ostensible  sequence  is  presented,  and 
our  young  lady,  encountered  again  by  her  stirred 
swain,  under  cover  of  night,  in  a  favouring  wood,  is  at 
once  encompassed  by  his  arms  and  pressed  to  his  lips 
and  heart  (for  celebration  thus  of  their  third  meeting)  we 
do  not  assist  at  a  well-nigh  heartbreaking  miscarriage 
of  "effect"  ?  We  see  effect,  invoked  in  vain,  simply 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  335 

stand  off  unconcerned;  effect  not  having  been  at  all 
consulted  in  advance  she  is  not  to  be  secured  on  such 
terms.  And  her  presence  would  so  have  redounded 
—perfectly  punctual  creature  as  she  is  on  a  made  ap- 
pointment and  a  clear  understanding — to  the  advan- 
tage of  all  concerned.  The  bearing  of  the  young  man's 
act  is  all  in  our  having  begun  to  conceive  it  as  possible, 
begun  even  to  desire  it,  in  the  light  of  what  has  pre- 
ceded; therefore  if  the  participants  have  not  been 
shown  us  as  on  the  way  to  it,  nor  the  question  of  it 
made  beautifully  to  tremble  for  us  in  the  air,  its  hap- 
piest connections  fail  and  we  but  stare  at  it  mystified. 
The  instance  is  undoubtedly  trifling,  but  in  the  in- 
finite complex  of  such  things  resides  for  a  work  of 
art  the  shy  virtue,  shy  at  least  till  wooed  forth,  of 
the  whole  susceptibility.  The  case  of  Mr.  Wells  might 
take  us  much  further — such  remarks  as  there  would 
be  to  make,  say,  on  such  a  question  as  the  due  under- 
standing, on  the  part  of  "The  Passionate  Friends" 
(not  as  associated  persons  but  as  a  composed  picture), 
of  what  that  composition  is  specifically  about  and 
where,  for  treatment  of  this  interest,  it  undertakes  to 
find  its  centre:  all  of  which,  we  are  willing  however 
to  grant,  falls  away  before  the  large  assurance  and  in- 
corrigible levity  with  which  this  adventurer  carries 
his  lapses — far  more  of  an  adventurer  as  he  is  than  any 
other  of  the  company.  The  composition,  as  we  have 
called  it,  heaven  saving  the  mark,  is  simply  at  any  and 
every  moment  "about"  Mr.  Wells's  general  adventure; 
which  is  quite  enough  while  it  preserves,  as  we  trust 
it  will  long  continue  to  do,  its  present  robust  pitch. 

We  have  already  noted  that  "Round  the  Corner," 
Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan's  liveliest  appeal  to  our  attention, 


336  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

belongs  to  the  order  of  constatations  pure  and  simple; 
to  the  degree  that  as  a  document  of  that  nature  and 
of  that  rigour  the  book  could  perhaps  not  more  com- 
pletely affirm  itself.  When  we  have  said  that  it  puts 
on  record  the  "tone,"  the  manners,  the  general  domestic 
proceedings  and  train  de  vie  of  an  amiable  clergyman's 
family  established  in  one  of  the  more  sordid  quarters 
of  a  big  black  northern  city  of  the  Liverpool  or  Man- 
chester complexion  we  have  advanced  as  far  in  the  way 
of  descriptive  statement  as  the  interesting  work  seems 
to  warrant.  For  it  is  interesting,  in  spite  of  its  leav- 
ing itself  on  our  hands  with  a  consistent  indifference 
to  any  question  of  the  charmed  application  springing 
from  it  all  that  places  it  in  the  forefront  of  its  type. 
Again  as  under  the  effect  of  Mr.  Bennett's  major  pro- 
ductions our  sole  inference  is  that  things,  the  things 
disclosed,  go  on  and  on,  in  any  given  case,  in  spite  of 
everything — with  Mr.  Cannan's  one  discernible  care 
perhaps  being  for  how  extraordinarily  much,  in  the 
particular  example  here  before  him,  they  were  able  to 
go  on  in  spite  of.  The  conception,  the  presentation 
of  this  enormous  inauspicious  amount  as  bearing  upon 
the  collective  career  of  the  Folyats  is,  we  think,  as 
near  as  the  author  comes  at  any  point  to  betraying 
an  awareness  of  a  subject.  Yet  again,  though  so  little 
encouraged  or  "backed,"  a  subject  after  a  fashion  makes 
itself,  even  as  it  has  made  itself  in  "The  Old  Wives' 
Tale"  and  in  "Clayhanger,"  in  "Sons  and  Lovers," 
where,  as  we  have  hinted,  any  assistance  rendered  us 
for  a  view  of  one  most  comfortably  enjoys  its  absence, 
and  in  Mr.  Hugh  Walpole's  newest  novel,  where  we 
wander  scarcely  less  with  our  hand  in  no  guiding 
grasp,  but  where  the  author's  good  disposition,  as  we 
feel  it,  to  provide  us  with  what  we  lack  if  he  only  knew 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  337 

how,  constitutes  in  itself  such  a  pleading  liberality. 
We  seem  to  see  him  in  this  spirit  lay  again  and  again  a 
flowered  carpet  for  our  steps.  If  we  do  not  include 
Mr.  Compton  Mackenzie  to  the  same  extent  in  our 
generalisation  it  is  really  because  we  note  a  difference 
in  him,  a  difference  in  favour  of  his  care  for  the  applica- 
tion. Preoccupations  seem  at  work  in  "Sinister 
Street,"  and  withal  in  "Carnival,"  the  brush  of  which 
we  in  other  quarters  scarce  even  suspect  and  at  some  of 
which  it  will  presently  be  of  profit  to  glance.  "I 
answer  for  it,  you  know,"  we  seem  at  any  rate  to 
hear  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan  say  with  an  admirably 
genuine  young  pessimism,  "I  answer  for  it  that  they 
were  really  like  that,  odd  or  unpleasant  or  uncon- 
tributive,  and  therefore  tiresome,  as  it  may  strike 
you;"  and  the  charm  of  Mr.  Cannan,  so  far  as  up  or 
down  the  rank  we  so  disengage  a  charm,  is  that  we 
take  him  at  his  word.  His  guarantee,  his  straight 
communication,  of  his  general  truth  is  a  value,  and 
values  are  rare — the  flood  of  fiction  is  apparently 
capable  of  running  hundreds  of  miles  without  a  single 
glint  of  one — and  thus  in  default  of  satisfaction  we 
get  stopgaps  and  are  thankful  often  under  a  genial 
touch  to  get  even  so  much.  The  value  indeed  is  crude, 
it  would  be  quadrupled  were  it  only  wrought  and 
shaped;  yet  it  has  still  the  rude  dignity  that  it  counts 
to  us  for  experience  or  at  least  for  what  we  call  under 
our  present  pitch  of  sensibility  force  of  impression. 
The  experience,  we  feel,  is  ever  something  to  conclude 
upon,  while  the  impression  is  content  to  wait;  to  wait, 
say,  in  the  spirit  in  which  we  must  accept  this  younger 
bustle  if  we  accept  it  at  all,  the  spirit  of  its  serving  as 
a  rather  presumptuous  lesson  to  us  in  patience.  While 
we  wait,  again,  we  are  amused — not  in  the  least,  also 


338  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  repeat,  up  to  the  notch  of  our  conception  of  amuse- 
ment, which  draws  upon  still  other  forms  and  sources; 
but  none  the  less  for  the  wonder,  the  intensity,  the 
actuality,  the  probity  of  the  vision.  This  is  much  as 
in  "Clayhanger"  and  in  "Hilda  Lessways,"  where, 
independently  of  the  effect,  so  considerably  rendered,  of 
the  long  lapse  of  time,  always  in  this  type  of  recital  a 
source  of  amusement  in  itself,  and  certainly  of  the 
noblest,  we  get  such  an  admirably  substantial  thing 
as  the  collective  image  of  the  Orgreaves,  the  local 
family  in  whose  ample  lap  the  amenities  and  the  hu- 
manities so  easily  sit,  for  Mr.  Bennett's  evocation  and 
his  protagonist's  recognition,  and  the  manner  of  the 
presentation  of  whom,  with  the  function  and  relation 
of  the  picture  at  large,  strikes  such  a  note  of  felicity, 
achieves  such  a  simulation  of  sense,  as  the  author 
should  never  again  be  excused  for  treating,  that  is  for 
neglecting,  as  beyond  his  range.  Here  figures  signally 
the  interesting  case  of  a  compositional  function  abso- 
lutely performed  by  mere  multiplication,  the  flow  of 
the  facts:  the  Orgreaves,  in  "Clayhanger,"  are  there, 
by  what  we  make  out,  but  for  "life,"  for  general  life 
only,  and  yet,  with  their  office  under  any  general  or 
inferential  meaning  entirely  unmarked,  come  doubt- 
less as  near  squaring  esthetically  with  the  famous 
formula  of  the  "slice  of  life"  as  any  example  that 
could  be  adduced;  happening  moreover  as  they  prob- 
ably do  to  owe  this  distinction  to  their  coincidence  at 
once  with  reality  and  charm — a  fact  esthetically  cu- 
rious and  delightful.  For  we  attribute  the  bold  stroke 
they  represent  much  more  to  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett's 
esthetic  instinct  than  to  anything  like  a  calculation 
of  his  bearings,  and  more  to  his  thoroughly  acquainted 
state,  as  we  may  again  put  it,  than  to  all  other  causes 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  339 

together:  which  strikingly  enough  shows  how  much 
complexity  of  interest  may  be  simulated  by  mere  pres- 
entation of  material,  mere  squeezing  of  the  orange, 
when  the  material  happens  to  be  "handsome"  or  the 
orange  to  be  sweet. 

Ill 

The  orange  of  our  persistent  simile  is  in  Mr.  Hugh 
Walpole's  hands  very  remarkably  sweet — a  quality 
we  recognise  in  it  even  while  reduced  to  observing  that 
the  squeeze  pure  and  simple,  the  fond,  the  lingering, 
the  reiterated  squeeze,  constitutes  as  yet  his  main 
perception  of  method.  He  enjoys  in  a  high  degree 
the  consciousness  of  saturation,  and  is  on  such  serene 
and  happy  terms  with  it  as  almost  make  of  critical 
interference,  in  so  bright  an  air,  an  assault  on  personal 
felicity.  Full  of  material  is  thus  the  author  of  "The 
Duchess  of  Wrexe,"  and  of  a  material  which  we  should 
describe  as  the  consciousness  of  youth  were  we  not 
rather  disposed  to  call  it  a  peculiar  strain  of  the  ex- 
treme unconsciousness.  Mr.  Walpole  offers  us  indeed 
a  rare  and  interesting  case — we  see  about  the  field  none 
other  like  it;  the  case  of  a  positive  identity  between  the 
spirit,  not  to  say  the  time  of  life  or  stage  of  experience, 
of  the  aspiring  artist  and  the  field  itself  of  his  vision. 
"The  Duchess  of  Wrexe"  reeks  with  youth  and  the 
love  of  youth  and  the  confidence  of  youth— youth 
taking  on  with  a  charming  exuberance  the  fondest  cos- 
tume or  disguise,  that  of  an  adventurous  and  voracious 
felt  interest,  interest  in  life,  in  London,  in  society,  in 
character,  in  Portland  Place,  in  the  Oxford  Circus,  in 
the  afternoon  tea-table,  in  the  torrid  weather,  in  fifty 
other  immediate  things  as  to  which  its  passion  and  its 


340  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

curiosity  are  of  the  sincerest.  The  wonderful  thing  is 
that  these  latter  forces  operate,  in  their  way,  without 
yet  being  disengaged  and  hand-free — disengaged,  that 
is,  from  their  state  of  being  young,  with  its  billowy 
mufflings  and  other  soft  obstructions,  the  state  of 
being  present,  being  involved  and  aware,  close  "up 
against"  the  whole  mass  of  possibilities,  being  in  short 
intoxicated  with  the  mixed  liquors  of  suggestion.  In 
the  fumes  of  this  acute  situation  Mr.  Walpole's  sub- 
ject-matter is  bathed;  the  situation  being  all  the  while 
so  much  more  his  own  and  that  of  a  juvenility  reacting, 
in  the  presence  of  everything,  "for  all  it  is  worth," 
than  the  devised  and  imagined  one,  however  he  may 
circle  about  some  such  cluster,  that  every  cupful  of 
his  excited  flow  tastes  three  times  as  much  of  his  tem- 
peramental freshness  as  it  tastes  of  this,  that  or  the 
other  character  or  substance,  above  all  of  this,  that  or 
the  other  group  of  antecedents  and  references,  sup- 
posed to  be  reflected  in  it.  All  of  which  does  not  mean, 
we  hasten  to  add,  that  the  author  of  "The  Duchess  of 
Wrexe"  has  not  the  gift  of  life;  but  only  that  he  strikes 
us  as  having  received  it,  straight  from  nature,  with 
such  a  concussion  as  to  have  kept  the  boon  at  the  stage 
of  violence — so  that,  fairly  pinned  down  by  it,  he  is 
still  embarrassed  for  passing  it  on.  On  the  day  he 
shall  have  worked  free  of  this  primitive  predicament, 
the  crude  fact  of  the  convulsion  itself,  there  need  be 
no  doubt  of  his  exhibiting  matter  into  which  method 
may  learn  how  to  bite.  The  tract  meanwhile  affects 
us  as  more  or  less  virgin  snow,  and  we  look  with  interest 
and  suspense  for  the  imprint  of  a  process. 

If  those  remarks  represent  all  the  while,  further,  that 
the  performances  we  have  glanced  at,  with  others  be- 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  341 

sides,  lead  our  attention  on,  we  hear  ourselves  the  more 
naturally  asked  what  it  is  then  that  we  expect  or  want, 
confessing  as  we  do  that  we  have  been  in  a  manner 
interested,  even  though,  from  case  to  case,  in  a  vary- 
ing degree,  and  that  Thackeray,  Turgenieff,  Balzac, 
Dickens,  Anatole  France,  no  matter  who,  can  not  do 
more  than  interest.  Let  us  therefore  concede  to  the 
last  point  that  small  mercies  are  better  than  none, 
that  there  are  latent  within  the  critic  numberless  lia- 
bilities to  being  "squared"  (the  extent  to  which  he  may 
on  occasion  betray  his  price !)  and  so  great  a  preference 
for  being  pleased  over  not  being,  that  you  may  again 
and  again  see  him  assist  with  avidity  at  the  attempt 
of  the  slice  of  life  to  butter  itself  thick.  Its  explana- 
tion that  it  is  a  slice  of  life  and  pretends  to  be  nothing 
else  figures  for  us,  say,  while  we  watch,  the  jam  super- 
added  to  the  butter.  For  since  the  jam,  on  this  sys- 
tem, descends  upon  our  desert,  in  its  form  of  manna, 
from  quite  another  heaven  than  the  heaven  of  method, 
the  mere  demonstration  of  its  agreeable  presence  is 
alone  sufficient  to  hint  at  our  more  than  one  chance 
of  being  supernaturally  fed.  The  happy-go-lucky  fash- 
ion of  it  is  indeed  not  then,  we  grant,  an  objection  so 
long  as  we  do  take  in  refreshment:  the  meal  may  be 
of  the  last  informality  and  yet  produce  in  the  event 
no  small  sense  of  repletion.  The  slice  of  life  devoured, 
the  butter  and  the  jam  duly  appreciated,  we  are  ready, 
no  doubt,  on  another  day,  to  trust  ourselves  afresh  to 
the  desert.  We  break  camp,  that  is,  and  face  toward 
a  further  stretch  of  it,  all  in  the  faith  that  we  shall  be 
once  more  provided  for.  We  take  the  risk,  we  enjoy 
more  or  less  the  assistance — more  or  less,  we  put  it, 
for  the  vision  of  a  possible  arrest  of  the  miracle  or 
failure  of  our  supply  never  wholly  leaves  us.  The 


342  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

phenomenon  is  too  uncanny,  the  happy-go-lucky,  as 
we  know  it  in  general,  never  has  been  trustable  to  the 
end;  the  absence  of  the  last  true  touch  in  the  prepa- 
ration of  its  viands  becomes  with  each  renewal  of  the 
adventure  a  more  sensible  fact.  By  the  last  true 
touch  we  mean  of  course  the  touch  of  the  hand  of  selec- 
tion; the  principle  of  selection  having  been  involved 
at  the  worst  or  the  least,  one  would  suppose,  in  any 
approach  whatever  to  the  loaf  of  life  with  the  arriere- 
pensee  of  a  slice.  There  being  no  question  of  a  slice 
upon  which  the  further  question  of  where  and  how  to 
cut  it  does  not  wait,  the  office  of  method,  the  idea  of 
choice  and  comparison,  have  occupied  the  ground  from 
the  first.  This  makes  clear,  to  a  moment's  reflection, 
that  there  can  be  no  such  thing  as  an  amorphous  slice, 
and  that  any  waving  aside  of  inquiry  as  to  the  sense 
and  value  of  a  chunk  of  matter  has  to  reckon  with  the 
simple  truth  of  its  having  been  born  of  naught  else  but 
measured  excision.  Reasons  have  been  the  fairies 
waiting  on  its  cradle,  the  possible  presence  of  a  bad 
fairy  in  the  form  of  a  bad  reason  to  the  contrary  not- 
withstanding. It  has  thus  had  connections  at  the 
very  first  stage  of  its  detachment  that  are  at  no  later 
stage  logically  to  be  repudiated;  let  it  lie  as  lumpish 
as  it  will — for  adoption,  we  mean,  of  the  ideal  of  the 
lump — it  has  been  tainted  from  too  far  back  with  the 
hard  liability  to  form,  and  thus  carries  in  its  very 
breast  the  hapless  contradiction  of  its  sturdy  claim  to 
have  none.  This  claim  has  the  inevitable  challenge 
at  once  to  meet.  How  can  a  slice  of  life  be  anything 
but  illustrational  of  the  loaf,  and  how  can  illustration 
not  immediately  bristle  with  every  sign  of  the  ex- 
tracted and  related  state  ?  The  relation  is  at  once  to 
what  the  thing  comes  from  and  to  what  it  waits  upon 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  343 

—which  last  is  our  act  of  recognition.  We  accordingly 
appreciate  it  in  proportion  as  it  so  accounts  for  itself; 
the  quantity  and  the  intensity  of  its  reference  are  the 
measure  of  our  knowledge  of  it.  This  is  exactly  why 
illustration  breaks  down  when  reference,  otherwise  ap- 
plication, runs  short,  and  why  before  any  assemblage 
of  figures  or  aspects,  otherwise  of  samples  and  spec- 
imens, the  question  of  what  these  are,  extensively, 
samples  and  specimens  of  declines  not  to  beset  us— 
why,  otherwise  again,  we  look  ever  for  the  supreme 
reference  that  shall  avert  the  bankruptcy  of  sense. 

Let  us  profess  all  readiness  to  repeat  that  we  may 
still  have  had,  on  the  merest  "life"  system,  or  that  of 
the  starkest  crudity  of  the  slice,  all  the  entertainment 
that  can  come  from  watching  a  wayfarer  engage  with 
assurance  in  an  alley  that  we  know  to  have  no  issue 
— and  from  watching  for  the  very  sake  of  the  face  that 
he  may  show  us  on  reappearing  at  its  mouth.  The 
recitals  of  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett,  Mr.  Gilbert  Cannan, 
Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence,  fairly  smell  of  the  real,  just  as 
the  "Fortitude"  and  "The  Duchess"  of  Mr.  Hugh 
Walpole  smell  of  the  romantic;  we  have  sufficiently 
noted  then  that,  once  on  the  scent,  we  are  capable  of 
pushing  ahead.  How  far  it  is  at  the  same  time  from 
being  all  a  matter  of  smell  the  terms  in  which  we  just 
above  glanced  at  the  weakness  of  the  spell  of  the 
happy-go-lucky  may  here  serve  to  indicate.  There 
faces  us  all  the  while  the  fact  that  the  act  of  considera- 
tion as  an  incident  of  the  esthetic  pleasure,  considera- 
tion confidently  knowing  us  to  have  sooner  or  later  to 
arrive  at  it,  may  be  again  and  again  postponed,  but 
can  never  hope  not  some  time  to  fall  due.  Consid- 
eration is  susceptible  of  many  forms,  some  one  or  other 


344  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

of  which  no  conscious  esthetic  effort  fails  to  cry  out 
for;  and  the  simplest  description  of  the  cry  of  the 
novel  when  sincere — for  have  we  not  heard  such  com- 
positions bluff  us,  as  it  were,  with  false  cries  ? — is  as 
an  appeal  to  us  when  we  have  read  it  once  to  read  it 
yet  again.  That  is  the  act  of  consideration;  no  other 
process  of  considering  approaches  this  for  directness, 
so  that  anything  short  of  it  is  virtually  not  to  consider 
at  all.  The  word  has  sometimes  another  sense,  that  of 
the  appeal  to  us  not,  for  the  world,  to  go  back — this 
being  of  course  consideration  of  a  sort;  the  sort  clearly 
that  the  truly  flushed  production  should  be  the  last  to 
invoke.  The  effect  of  consideration,  we  need  scarce 
remark,  is  to  light  for  us  in  a  work  of  art  the  hundred 
questions  of  how  and  why  and  whither,  and  the  effect 
of  these  questions,  once  lighted,  is  enormously  to  thicken 
and  complicate,  even  if  toward  final  clarifications, 
what  we  have  called  the  amused  state  produced  in  us 
by  the  work.  The  more  our  amusement  multiplies 
its  terms  the  more  fond  and  the  more  rewarded  con- 
sideration becomes;  the  fewer  it  leaves  them,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  less  to  be  resisted  for  us  is  the  impres- 
sion of  "bare  ruined  choirs  where  late  the  sweet  birds 
sang."  Birds  that  have  appeared  to  sing,  or  whose 
silence  we  have  not  heeded,  on  a  first  perusal,  prove 
on  a  second  to  have  no  note  to  contribute,  and  whether 
or  no  a  second  is  enough  to  admonish  us  of  those  we 
miss,  we  mostly  expect  much  from  it  in  the  way  of 
emphasis  of  those  we  find.  Then  it  is  that  notes  of 
intention  become  more  present  or  more  absent;  then 
it  is  that  we  take  the  measure  of  what  we  have  already 
called  our  effective  provision.  The  bravest  providers 
and  designers  show  at  this  point  something  still  in 
store  which  only  the  second  rummage  was  appointed 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  345 

to  draw  forth.  To  the  variety  of  these  ways  of  not 
letting  our  fondness  fast  is  there  not  practically  no 
limit  ? — and  of  the  arts,  the  devices,  the  graces,  the 
subtle  secrets  applicable  to  such  an  end  what  pre- 
sumptuous critic  shall  pretend  to  draw  the  list  ?  Let 
him  for  the  moment  content  himself  with  saying  that 
many  of  the  most  effective  are  mysteries,  precisely,  of 
method,  or  that  even  when  they  are  not  most  essen- 
tially and  directly  so  it  takes  method,  blest  method,  to 
extract  their  soul  and  to  determine  their  action. 

It  is  odd  and  delightful  perhaps  that  at  the  very 
moment  of  our  urging  this  truth  we  should  happen  to 
be  regaled  with  a  really  supreme  specimen  of  the  part 
playable  in  a  novel  by  the  source  of  interest,  the  prin- 
ciple of  provision  attended  to,  for  which  we  claim 
importance.  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad's  "Chance"  is  none 
the  less  a  signal  instance  of  provision  the  most  earnest 
and  the  most  copious  for  its  leaving  ever  so  much  to 
be  said  about  the  particular  provision  effected.  It  is 
none  the  less  an  extraordinary  exhibition  of  method  by 
the  fact  that  the  method  is,  we  venture  to  say,  without 
a  precedent  in  any  like  work.  It  places  Mr.  Conrad 
absolutely  alone  as  a  votary  of  the  way  to  do  a  thing 
that  shall  make  it  undergo  most  doing.  The  way  to 
do  it  that  shall  make  it  undergo  least  is  the  line  on 
which  we  are  mostly  now  used  to  see  prizes  carried 
off;  so  that  the  author  of  "Chance"  gathers  up  on 
this  showing  all  sorts  of  comparative  distinction.  He 
gathers  up  at  least  two  sorts — that  of  bravery  in  abso- 
lutely reversing  the  process  most  accredited,  and  that, 
quite  separate,  we  make  out,  of  performing  the  ma- 
noeuvre under  salvos  of  recognition.  It  is  not  in  these 
days  often  given  to  a  refinement  of  design  to  be  recog- 


346  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

nised,  but  Mr.  Conrad  has  made  his  achieve  that 
miracle — save  in  so  far  indeed  as  the  miracle  has  been 
one  thing  and  the  success  another.  The  miracle  is  of 
the  rarest,  confounding  all  calculation  and  suggesting 
more  reflections  than  we  can  begin  to  make  place  for 
here;  but  the  sources  of  surprise  surrounding  it  might 
be,  were  this  possible,  even  greater  and  yet  leave  the 
fact  itself  in  all  independence,  the  fact  that  the  whole 
undertaking  was  committed  by  its  very  first  step  either 
to  be  "art"  exclusively  or  to  be  nothing.  This  is  the 
prodigious  rarity,  since  surely  we  have  known  for  many 
a  day  no  other  such  case  of  the  whole  clutch  of  eggs, 
and  these  withal  of  the  freshest,  in  that  one  basket; 
to  which  it  may  be  added  that  if  we  say  for  many  a 
day  this  is  not  through  our  readiness  positively  to 
associate  the  sight  with  any  very  definite  moment  of 
the  past.  What  concerns  us  is  that  the  general  effect 
of  "Chance"  is  arrived  at  by  a  pursuance  of  means 
to  the  end  in  view  contrasted  with  which  every  other 
current  form  of  the  chase  can  only  affect  us  as  cheap 
and  futile;  the  carriage  of  the  burden  or  amount  of 
service  required  on  these  lines  exceeding  surely  all 
other  such  displayed  degrees  of  energy  put  together. 
Nothing  could  well  interest  us  more  than  to  see  the 
exemplary  value  of  attention,  attention  given  by  the 
author  and  asked  of  the  reader,  attested  in  a  case  in 
which  it  has  had  almost  unspeakable  difficulties  to 
struggle  with — since  so  we  are  moved  to  qualify  the 
particular  difficulty  Mr.  Conrad  has  "elected"  to 
face:  the  claim  for  method  in  itself,  method  in  this 
very  sense  of  attention  applied,  would  be  somehow  less 
lighted  if  the  difficulties  struck  us  as  less  consciously, 
or  call  it  even  less  wantonly,  invoked.  What  they 
consist  of  we  should  have  to  diverge  here  a  little  to  say, 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  347 

and  should  even  then  probably  but  lose  ourselves  in 
the  dim  question  of  why  so  special,  eccentric  and  des- 
perate a  course,  so  deliberate  a  plunge  into  threatened 
frustration,  should  alone  have  seemed  open.  It  has 
been  the  course,  so  far  as  three  words  may  here  serve, 
of  his  so  multiplying  his  creators  or,  as  we  are  now 
fond  of  saying,  producers,  as  to  make  them  almost 
more  numerous  and  quite  emphatically  more  material 
than  the  creatures  and  the  production  itself  in  whom 
and  which  we  by  the  general  law  of  fiction  expect  such 
agents  to  lose  themselves.  We  take  for  granted  by  the 
general  law  of  fiction  a  primary  author,  take  him  so 
much  for  granted  that  we  forget  him  in  proportion  as 
he  works  upon  us,  and  that  he  works  upon  us  most  in 
fact  by  making  us  forget  him. 

Mr.  Conrad's  first  care  on  the  other  hand  is  expressly 
to  posit  or  set  up  a  reciter,  a  definite  responsible  in- 
tervening first  person  singular,  possessed  of  infinite 
sources  of  reference,  who  immediately  proceeds  to  set 
up  another,  to  the  end  that  this  other  may  conform 
again  to  the  practice,  and  that  even  at  that  point  the 
bridge  over  to  the  creature,  or  in  other  words  to  the 
situation  or  the  subject,  the  thing  "produced,"  shall, 
if  the  fancy  takes  it,  once  more  and  yet  once  more 
glory  in  a  gap.  It  is  easy  to  see  how  heroic  the  under- 
taking of  an  effective  fusion  becomes  on  these  terms, 
fusion  between  what  we  are  to  know  and  that  prodigy 
of  our  knowing  which  is  ever  half  the  very  beauty  of 
the  atmosphere  of  authenticity;  from  the  moment  the 
reporters  are  thus  multiplied  from  pitch  to  pitch  the 
tone  of  each,  especially  as  "rendered"  by  his  precursor 
in  the  series,  becomes  for  the  prime  poet  of  all  an  im- 
mense question — these  circumferential  tones  having 


348  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

not  only  to  be  such  individually  separate  notes,  but  to 
keep  so  clear  of  the  others,  the  central,  the  numerous 
and  various  voices  of  the  agents  proper,  those  express- 
ive of  the  action  itself  and  in  whom  the  objectivity 
resides.  We  usually  escape  the  worst  of  this  dif- 
ficulty of  a  tone  about  the  tone  of  our  characters,  our 
projected  performers,  by  keeping  it  single,  keeping  it 
"down"  and  thereby  comparatively  impersonal  or,  as 
we  may  say,  inscrutable;  which  is  what  a  creative 
force,  in  its  blest  fatuity,  likes  to  be.  But  the  omnis- 
cience, remaining  indeed  nameless,  though  constantly 
active,  which  sets  Marlow's  omniscience  in  motion 
from  the  very  first  page,  insisting  on  a  reciprocity 
with  it  throughout,  this  original  omniscience  invites 
consideration  of  itself  only  in  a  degree  less  than  that 
in  which  Marlow's  own  invites  it;  and  Marlow's  own 
is  a  prolonged  hovering  flight  of  the  subjective  over  the 
outstretched  ground  of  the  case  exposed.  We  make 
out  this  ground  but  through  the  shadow  cast  by  the 
flight,  clarify  it  though  the  real  author  visibly  reminds 
himself  again  and  again  that  he  must — all  the  more 
that,  as  if  by  some  tremendous  forecast  of  future  ap- 
plied science,  the  upper  aeroplane  causes  another,  as 
we  have  said,  to  depend  from  it  and  that  one  still 
another;  these  dropping  shadow  after  shadow,  to  the 
no  small  menace  of  intrinsic  colour  and  form  and 
whatever,  upon  the  passive  expanse.  What  shall  we 
most  call  Mr.  Conrad's  method  accordingly  but  his 
attempt  to  clarify  quand  meme — ridden  as  he  has  been, 
we  perceive  at  the  end  of  fifty  pages  of  "Chance,"  by 
such  a  danger  of  steeping  his  matter  jn  perfect  .eventual 
obscuration  as  we  recall  no  other  artist's  consenting  to 
with  an  equal  grace.  This  grace,  which  presently 
comes  over  us  as  the  sign  of  the  whole  business,  is  Mr. 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  349 

Conrad's  gallantry  itself,  and  the  shortest  account  of 
the  rest  of  the  connection  for  our  present  purpose  is 
that  his  gallantry  is  thus  his  success.  It  literally  strikes 
us  that  his  volume  sets  in  motion  more  than  anything 
else  a  drama  in  which  his  own  system  and  his  com- 
bined eccentricities  of  recital  represent  the  protagonist 
in  face  of  powers  leagued  against  it,  and  of  which  the 
denouement  gives  us  the  system  fighting  in  triumph, 
though  with  its  back  desperately  to  the  wall,  and  lay- 
ing the  powers  piled  up  at  its  feet.  This  frankly  has 
been  our  spectacle,  our  suspense  and  our  thrill;  with 
the  one  flaw  on  the  roundness  of  it  all  the  fact  that  the 
predicament  was  not  imposed  rather  than  invoked, 
was  not  the  effect  of  a  challenge  from  without,  but  that 
of  a  mystic  impulse  from  within. 

Of  an  exquisite  refinement  at  all  events  are  the 
critical  questions  opened  up  in  the  attempt,  the  ques- 
tion in  particular  of  by  what  it  exactly  is  that  the  ex- 
periment is  crowned.  Pronouncing  it  crowned  and 
the  case  saved  by  sheer  gallantry,  as  we  did  above,  is 
perhaps  to  fall  just  short  of  the  conclusion  we  might 
reach  were  we  to  push  further.  "Chance"  is  an  ex- 
ample of  objectivity,  most  precious  of  aims,  not  only 
menaced  but  definitely  compromised;  whereby  we  are 
in  presence  of  something  really  of  the  strangest,  a 
general  and  diffused  lapse  of  authenticity  which  an 
inordinate  number  of  common  readers — since  it  always 
takes  this  and  these  to  account  encouragingly  for 
"editions" — have  not  only  condoned  but  have  em- 
phatically commended.  They  can  have  done  this  but 
through  the  bribe  of  some  authenticity  other  in  kind, 
no  doubt,  and  seeming  to  them  equally  great  if  not 
greater,  which  gives  back  by  the  left  hand  what  the 


350  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

right  has,  with  however  dissimulated  a  grace,  taken 
away.  What  Mr.  Conrad's  left  hand  gives  back  then 
is  simply  Mr.  Conrad  himself.  We  asked  above  what 
would  become,  by  such  a  form  of  practice,  of  indis- 
pensable "fusion"  or,  to  call  it  by  another  name,  of 
the  fine  process  by  which  our  impatient  material,  at 
a  given  moment,  shakes  off  the  humiliation  of  the 
handled,  the  fumbled  state,  puts  its  head  in  the  air 
and,  to  its  own  beautiful  illusory  consciousness  at 
least,  simply  runs  its  race.  Such  an  amount  of  han- 
dling and  fumbling  and  repointing  has  it,  on  the  system 
of  the  multiplied  "putter  into  marble,"  to  shake  off! 
And  yet  behold,  the  sense  of  discomfort,  as  the  show 
here  works  out,  has  been  conjured  away.  The  fusion 
has  taken  place,  or  at  any  rate  a  fusion;  only  it  has 
been  transferred  in  wondrous  fashion  to  an  unexpected, 
and  on  the  whole  more  limited  plane  of  operation;  it 
has  succeeded  in  getting  effected,  so  to  speak,  not  on 
the  ground  but  in  the  air,  not  between  our  writer's 
idea  and  his  machinery,  but  between  the  different 
parts  of  his  genius  itself.  His  genius  is  what  is  left 
over  from  the  other,  the  compromised  and  compro- 
mising quantities — the  Marlows  and  their  determi- 
nant inventors  and  interlocutors,  the  Powells,  the 
Franklins,  the  Fynes,  the  tell-tale  little  dogs,  the  suc- 
cessive members  of  a  cue  from  one  to  the  other  of 
which  the  sense  and  the  interest  of  the  subject  have 
to  be  passed  on  together,  in  the  manner  of  the  buckets 
of  water  for  the  improvised  extinction  of  a  fire,  before 
reaching  our  apprehension:  all  with  whatever  result, 
to  this  apprehension,  of  a  quantity  to  be  allowed  for 
as  spilt  by  the  way.  The  residuum  has  accordingly 
the  form  not  of  such  and  such  a  number  of  images 
discharged  and  ordered,  but  that  rather  of  a  wander- 
ing, circling,  yearning  imaginative  faculty,  encountered 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  351 

in  its  habit  as  it  lives  and  diffusing  itself  as  a  presence 
or  a  tide,  a  noble  sociability  of  vision.  So  we  have  as 
the  force  that  fills  the  cup  just  the  high-water  mark  of 
a  beautiful  and  generous  mind  at  play  in  conditions 
comparatively  thankless  —  thoroughly,  unweariedly, 
yet  at  the  same  time  ever  so  elegantly  at  play,  and 
doing  more  for  itself  than  it  succeeds  in  getting  done 
for  it.  Than  which  nothing  could  be  of  a  greater 
reward  to  critical  curiosity  were  it  not  still  for  the 
wonder  of  wonders,  a  new  page  in  the  record  altogether 
—the  fact  that  these  things  are  apparently  what  the 
common  reader  has  seen  and  understood.  Great  then 
would  seem  to  be  after  all  the  common  reader ! 

IV 

We  must  not  fail  of  the  point,  however,  that  we 
have  made  these  remarks  not  at  all  with  an  eye  to  the 
question  of  whether  "Chance"  has  been  well  or  ill 
inspired  as  to  its  particular  choice  of  a  way  of  really 
attending  to  itself  among  all  the  possible  alternatives, 
but  only  on  the  ground  of  its  having  compared,  se- 
lected and  held  on;  since  any  alternative  that  might 
have  been  preferred  and  that  should  have  been  effect- 
ively adopted  would  point  our  moral  as  well — and  this 
even  if  it  is  of  profit  none  the  less  to  note  the  most 
striking  of  Mr.  Conrad's  compositional  consequences. 
There  is  one  of  these  that  has  had  most  to  do  with 
making  his  pages  differ  in  texture,  and  to  our  very 
first  glance,  from  that  straggle  of  ungoverned  verbiage 
which  leads  us  up  and  down  those  of  his  fellow  fabu- 
lists in  general  on  a  vain  hunt  for  some  projected  mass 
of  truth,  some  solidity  of  substance,  as  to  which  the 
deluge  of  "dialogue,"  the  flooding  report  of  things  said, 
or  at  least  of  words  pretendedly  spoken,  shall  have 


352  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

learned  the  art  of  being  merely  illustrational.  What 
first  springs  from  any  form  of  real  attention,  no  mat- 
ter which,  we  on  a  comparison  so  made  quickly  per- 
ceive to  be  a  practical  challenge  of  the  preposterous 
pretension  of  this  most  fatuous  of  the  luxuries  of  loose- 
ness to  acquit  itself  with  authority  of  the  structural 
and  compositional  office.  Infinitely  valid  and  vivid 
as  illustration,  it  altogether  depends  for  dignity  and 
sense  upon  our  state  of  possession  of  its  historic  pre- 
liminaries, its  promoting  conditions,  its  supporting 
ground;  that  is  upon  our  waiting  occupancy  of  the 
chamber  it  proposes  to  light  and  which,  when  no  other 
source  of  effect  is  more  indicated,  it  doubtless  quite 
inimitably  fills  with  life.  Then  its  relation  to  what 
encloses  and  confines  and,  in  its  sovereign  interest, 
finely  compresses  it,  offering  it  constituted  aspects, 
surfaces,  presences,  faces  and  figures  of  the  matter  we 
are  either  generally  or  acutely  concerned  with  to  play 
over  and  hang  upon,  then  this  relation  gives  it  all  its 
value:  it  has  flowered  from  the  soil  prepared  and  sheds 
back  its  richness  into  the  field  of  cultivation.  It  is 
interesting,  in  a  word,  only  when  nothing  else  is  equally 
so,  carrying  the  vessel  of  the  interest  with  least  of  a 
stumble  or  a  sacrifice;  but  it  is  of  the  essence  that  the 
sounds  so  set  in  motion  (it  being  as  sound  above  all 
that  they  undertake  to  convey  sense,)  should  have 
something  to  proceed  from,  in  their  course,  to  address 
themselves  to  and  be  affected  by,  with  all  the  sensibil- 
ity of  sounds.  It  is  of  the  essence  that  they  should 
live  in  a  medium,  and  in  a  medium  only,  since  it  takes 
a  medium  to  give  them  an  identity,  the  intenser  the 
better,  and  that  the  medium  should  subserve  them  by 
enjoying  in  a  like  degree  the  luxury  of  an  existence. 
We  need  of  course  scarce  expressly  note  that  the  play, 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  353 

as  distinguished  from  the  novel,  lives  exclusively  on 
the  spoken  word — not  on  the  report  of  the  thing  said 
but,  directly  and  audibly,  on  that  very  thing;  that  it 
thrives  by  its  law  on  the  exercise  under  which  the 
novel  hopelessly  collapses  when  the  attempt  is  made 
disproportionately  to  impose  it.  There  is  no  danger 
for  the  play  of  the  cart  before  the  horse,  no  disaster 
involved  in  it;  that  form  being  all  horse  and  the 
interest  itself  mounted  and  astride,  and  not,  as  that 
of  the  novel,  dependent  in  the  first  instance  on  wheels. 
The  order  in  which  the  drama  simply  says  things  gives 
it  all  its  form,  while  the  story  told  and  the  picture 
painted,  as  the  novel  at  the  pass  we  have  brought  it 
to  embraces  them,  reports  of  an  infinite  diversity  of 
matters,  gathers  together  and  gives  out  again  a  hun- 
dred sorts,  and  finds  its  order  and  its  structure,  its 
unity  and  its  beauty,  in  the  alternation  of  parts  and 
the  adjustment  of  differences.  It  is  no  less  apparent 
that  the  novel  may  be  fundamentally  organised — such 
things  as  "The  Egoist"  and  "The  Awkward  Age"  are 
there  to  prove  it;  but  in  this  case  it  adheres  uncon- 
fusedly  to  that  logic  and  has  nothing  to  say  to  any 
other.  Were  it  not  for  a  second  exception,  one  at  this 
season  rather  pertinent,  "Chance"  then,  to  return  to 
it  a  moment,  would  be  as  happy  an  example  as  we 
might  just  now  put  our  hand  on  of  the  automatic 
working  of  a  scheme  unfavourable  to  that  treatment 
of  the  colloquy  by  endless  dangling  strings  which 
makes  the  current  "story"  in  general  so  figure  to  us 
a  porcupine  of  extravagant  yet  abnormally  relaxed 
bristles. 

The  exception  we  speak  of  would  be  Mrs.  Wharton's 
"Custom  of  the  Country,"  in  which,  as  in  this  lady's 


354  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

other  fictions,  we  recognise  the  happy  fact  of  an  abuse 
of  no  one  of  the  resources  it  enjoys  at  the  expense  of 
the  others;  the  whole  series  offering  as  general  an 
example  of  dialogue  flowering  and  not  weeding,  illus- 
trational  and  not  itself  starved  of  illustration,  or 
starved  of  referability  and  association,  which  is  the 
same  thing,  as  meets  the  eye  in  any  glance  that  leaves 
Mr.  Wells  at  Mr.  Wells's  best-inspired  hour  out  of  our 
own  account.  The  truth  is,  however,  that  Mrs.  Whar- 
ton  is  herself  here  out  of  our  account,  even  as  we 
have  easily  recognised  Mr.  Galsworthy  and  Mr.  Mau- 
rice Hewlett  to  be;  these  three  authors,  with  what- 
ever differences  between  them,  remaining  essentially 
votaries  of  selection  and  intention  and  being  embodi- 
ments thereby,  in  each  case,  of  some  state  over  and 
above  that  simple  state  of  possession  of  much  evi- 
dence, that  confused  conception  of  what  the  "slice" 
of  life  must  consist  of,  which  forms  the  text  of  our 
remarks.  Mrs.  Wharton,  her  conception  of  the  "slice" 
so  clarified  and  cultivated,  would  herself  of  course 
form  a  text  in  quite  another  connection,  as  Mr.  Hew- 
lett and  Mr.  Galsworthy  would  do  each  in  his  own, 
which  we  abstain  from  specifying;  but  there  are  two 
or  three  grounds  on  which  the  author  of  "Ethan 
Frome,"  "The  Valley  of  Decision"  and  "The  House 
of  Mirth,"  whom  we  brush  by  with  reluctance,  would 
point  the  moral  of  the  treasure  of  amusement  sitting 
in  the  lap  of  method  with  a  felicity  peculiarly  her  own. 
If  one  of  these  is  that  she  too  has  clearly  a  saturation 
— which  it  would  be  ever  so  interesting  to  determine 
and  appreciate — we  have  it  from  her  not  in  the  crude 
state  but  in  the  extract,  the  extract  that  makes  all 
the  difference  for  our  sense  of  an  artistic  economy. 
If  the  extract,  as  would  appear,  is  the  result  of  an 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  355 

artistic  economy,  as  the  latter  is  its  logical  motive,  so 
we  find  it  associated  in  Mrs.  Wharton  with  such  ap- 
peals to  our  interest,  for  instance,  as  the  fact  that, 
absolutely  sole  among  our  students  of  this  form,  she 
suffers,  she  even  encourages,  her  expression  to  flower 
into  some  sharp  image  or  figure  of  her  thought  when 
that  will  make  the  thought  more  finely  touch  us.  Her 
step,  without  straying,  encounters  the  living  analogy, 
which  she  gathers,  in  passing,  without  awkwardness  of 
pause,  and  which  the  page  then  carries  on  its  breast 
as  a  trophy  plucked  by  a  happy  adventurous  dash,  a 
token  of  spirit  and  temper  as  well  as  a  proof  of  vision. 
We  note  it  as  one  of  the  kinds  of  proof  of  vision  that 
most  fail  us  in  that  comparative  desert  of  the  inselect- 
ive  where  our  imagination  has  itself  to  hunt  out  or 
call  down  (often  among  strange  witnessed  flounderings 
or  sand-storms)  such  analogies  as  may  mercifully  "put" 
the  thing.  Mrs.  Wharton  not  only  owes  to  her  culti- 
vated art  of  putting  it  the  distinction  enjoyed  when 
some  ideal  of  expression  has  the  whole  of  the  case,  the 
case  once  made  its  concern,  in  charge,  but  might  fur- 
ther act  for  us,  were  we  to  follow  up  her  exhibition, 
as  lighting  not  a  little  that  question  of  "tone,"  the 
author's  own  intrinsic,  as  to  which  we  have  just  seen 
Mr.  Conrad's  late  production  rather  tend  to  darken 
counsel.  "The  Custom  of  the  Country"  is  an  emi- 
nent instance  of  the  sort  of  tonic  value  most  opposed 
to  that  baffled  relation  between  the  subject-matter 
and  its  emergence  which  we  find  constituted  by  the 
circumvalations  of  "Chance."  Mrs.  Wharton's  reac- 
tion in  presence  of  the  aspects  of  life  hitherto,  it  would 
seem,  mainly  exposed  to  her  is  for  the  most  part  the 
ironic — to  which  we  gather  that  these  particular  aspects 
have  so  much  ministered  that,  were  we  to  pursue  the 


356  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

quest,  we  might  recognise  in  them  precisely  the  sat- 
uration as  to  which  we  a  moment  ago  reserved  our 
judgment.  "The  Custom  of  the  Country"  is  at  any 
rate  consistently,  almost  scientifically  satiric,  as  indeed 
the  satiric  light  was  doubtless  the  only  one  in  which 
the  elements  engaged  could  at  all  be  focussed  together. 
But  this  happens  directly  to  the  profit  of  something 
that,  as  we  read,  becomes  more  and  more  one  with 
the  principle  of  authority  at  work;  the  light  that 
gathers  is  a  dry  light,  of  great  intensity,  and  the  effect, 
if  not  rather  the  very  essence,  of  its  dryness  is  a  par- 
ticular fine  asperity.  The  usual  "creative"  conditions 
and  associations,  as  we  have  elsewhere  languished 
among  them,  are  thanks  to  this  ever  so  sensibly  altered; 
the  general  authoritative  relation  attested  becomes  clear 
— we  move  in  an  air  purged  at  a  stroke  of  the  old  sen- 
timental and  romantic  values,  the  perversions  with  the 
maximum  of  waste  of  perversions,  and  we  shall  not 
here  attempt  to  state  what  this  makes  for  in  the  way 
of  esthetic  refreshment  and  relief;  the  waste  having 
kept  us  so  dangling  on  the  dark  esthetic  abyss.  A 
shade  of  asperity  may  be  in  such  fashion  a  security 
against  waste,  and  in  the  dearth  of  displayed  securities 
we  should  welcome  it  on  that  ground  alone.  It  helps 
at  any  rate  to  constitute  for  the  talent  manifest  in 
"The  Custom"  a  rare  identity,  so  far  should  we  have 
to  go  to  seek  another  instance  of  the  dry,  or  call  it 
perhaps  even  the  hard,  intellectual  touch  in  the  soft, 
or  call  it  perhaps  even  the  humid,  temperamental  air; 
in  other  words  of  the  masculine  conclusion  tending  so 
to  crown  the  feminine  observation. 

If  we  mentioned  Mr.   Compton  Mackenzie  at  the 
beginning  of  these  reflections  only  to  leave  him  wait- 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  357 

ing  for  some  further  appreciation,  this  is  exactly  be- 
cause his  case,  to  the  most  interesting  effect,  is  no 
simple  one,  like  two  or  three  of  our  others,  but  on  the 
contrary  mystifying  enough  almost  to  stand  by  itself. 
What  would  be  this  striking  young  writer's  state  of 
acquaintance  and  possession,  and  should  we  find  it, 
on  our  recognition  of  it,  to  be  all  he  is  content  to 
pitch  forth,  without  discriminations  or  determinants, 
without  motives  or  lights  ?  Do  "Carnival"  and  "Sin- 
ister Street"  proceed  from  the  theory  of  the  slice  or 
from  the  conception  of  the  extract,  "the  extract  flasked 
and  fine,"  the  chemical  process  superseding  the  me- 
chanical ?  Mr.  Compton  Mackenzie's  literary  aspect, 
though  decidedly  that  of  youth,  or  that  of  experience, 
a  great  deal  of  young  experience,  in  its  freshness,  offers 
the  attraction  of  a  complexity  defiant  of  the  prompt 
conclusion,  really  charms  us  by  giving  us  something 
to  wonder  about.  We  literally  find  it  not  easy  to  say 
if  there  may  not  lurk  in  "Carnival,"  for  example,  a 
selective  sense  more  apprehensible,  to  a  push  of  in- 
quiry, than  its  overflooded  surface,  a  real  invitation  to 
wade  and  upon  which  everything  within  the  author's 
ken  appears  poured  out,  would  at  first  lead  us  to  sus- 
pect. The  question  comes  up  in  like  fashion  as  to  the 
distinctly  more  developed  successor  of  that  work,  be- 
fore which  we  in  fact  find  questions  multiply  to  a  posi- 
tive quickening  of  critical  pleasure.  We  ask  ourselves 
what  "Sinister  Street"  may  mean  as  a  whole  in  spite 
of  our  sense  of  being  brushed  from  the  first  by  a  hun- 
dred subordinate  purposes,  the  succession  and  alter- 
nation of  which  seem  to  make  after  a  fashion  a  plan, 
and  which,  though  full  of  occasional  design,  yet  fail 
to  gather  themselves  for  application  or  to  converge  to 
an  idea.  An)'  idea  will  serve,  ever,  that  has  held  up 


358  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

its  candle  to  composition — and  it  is  perhaps  because 
composition  proposes  itself  under  Mr.  Compton  Mac- 
kenzie's energy  on  a  scale  well-nigh  of  the  most  pro- 
digious that  we  must  wait  to  see  whither  it  tends. 
The  question  of  what  he  may  here  mean  "on  the 
whole,"  as  we  just  said,  is  doubtless  admonished  to 
stand  back  till  we  be  possessed  of  the  whole.  This 
interesting  volume  is  but  a  first,  committed  up  to  its 
eyes  to  continuity  and  with  an  announced  sequel  to 
follow.  The  recital  exhibits  at  the  point  we  have 
reached  the  intimate  experience  of  a  boy  at  school  and 
in  his  holidays,  the  amplification  of  which  is  to  come 
with  his  terms  and  their  breaks  at  a  university;  and 
the  record  will  probably  form  a  more  squared  and  ex- 
tended picture  of  life  equally  conditioned  by  the  ex- 
tremity of  youth  than  we  shall  know  where  else  to 
look  for.  Youth  clearly  has  been  Mr.  Mackenzie's 
saturation,  as  it  has  been  Mr.  Hugh  Walpole's,  but 
we  see  this  not  as  a  subject  (youth  in  itself  is  no  spe- 
cific subject,  any  more  than  age  is,)  but  as  matter  for 
a  subject  and  as  requiring  a  motive  to  redeem  it  from 
the  merely  passive  state  of  the  slice.  We  are  sure 
throughout  both  "Sinister  Street"  and  "Carnival"  of 
breathing  the  air  of  the  extract,  as  we  contentiously 
call  it,  only  in  certain  of  the  rounded  episodes  strung 
on  the  loose  cord  as  so  many  vivid  beads,  each  of  its 
chosen  hue,  and  the  series  of  which,  even  with  differ- 
ences of  price  between  them,  we  take  for  a  lively  gage 
of  performance  to  come.  These  episodes  would  be 
easy  to  cite;  they  are  handsomely  numerous  and  each 
strikes  us  as  giving  in  its  turn  great  salience  to  its  mo- 
tive; besides  which  each  is  in  its  turn  "done"  with 
an  eminent  sense  and  a  remarkably  straight  hand  for 
doing.  They  may  well  be  cited  together  as  both  sig- 
nally and  finely  symptomatic,  for  the  literary  gesture 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  359 

and  the  bravura  breadth  with  which  such  frequent 
medallions  as  the  adventure  on  the  boy's  part  of  the 
Catholic  church  at  Bournemouth,  as  his  experiment  of 
the  Benedictine  house  in  Wiltshire,  as  his  period  of 
acquaintance  with  the  esthetic  cenacle  in  London,  as 
his  relation  with  his  chosen  school  friend  under  the 
intensity  of  boyish  choosing,  are  ornamentally  hung 
up,  differ  not  so  much  in  degree  as  in  kind  from  any 
play  of  presentation  that  we  mostly  see  elsewhere  of- 
fered us.  To  which  we  might  add  other  like  matters 
that  we  lack  space  to  enumerate,  the  scene,  the  aspect, 
the  figure  in  motion  tending  always,  under  touches 
thick  and  strong,  to  emerge  and  flush,  sound  and  strike, 
catch  us  in  its  truth.  We  have  read  "tales  of  school 
life"  in  which  the  boys  more  or  less  swarmed  and 
sounded,  but  from  which  the  masters  have  practically 
been  quite  absent,  to  the  great  weakening  of  any  pic- 
ture of  the  boyish  consciousness,  on  which  the  magis- 
terial fact  is  so  heavily  projected.  If  that  is  less  true 
for  some  boys  than  for  others,  the  "point"  of  Michael 
Fane  is  that  for  him  it  is  truest.  The  types  of  mas- 
ters have  in  "Sinister  Street"  both  number  and  sali- 
ence, rendered  though  they  be  mostly  as  grotesques — 
which  effect  we  take  as  characterising  the  particular 
turn  of  mind  of  the  young  observer  and  discoverer 
commemorated. 

That  he  is  a  discoverer  is  of  the  essence  of  his  in- 
terest, a  successful  and  resourceful  young  discoverer, 
even  as  the  poor  ballet-girl  in  "Carnival"  is  a  trag- 
ically baffled  and  helpless  one;  so  that  what  each  of 
the  works  proposes  to  itself  is  a  recital  of  the  things 
discovered.  Those  thus  brought  to  our  view  in  the 
boy's  case  are  of  much  more  interest,  to  our  sense, 
than  like  matters  in  the  other  connection,  thanks  to 


360  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

his  remarkable  and  living  capacity;  the  heroine  of 
"Carnival"  is  frankly  too  minute  a  vessel  of  experi- 
ence for  treatment  on  the  scale  on  which  the  author 
has  honoured  her — she  is  done  assuredly,  but  under 
multiplications  of  touch  that  become  too  much,  in  the 
narrow  field,  monotonies;  and  she  leaves  us  asking  al- 
most as  much  what  she  exhibitionally  means,  what  ap- 
plication resides  in  the  accumulation  of  facts  concern- 
ing her,  as  if  she  too  were  after  all  but  a  slice,  or  at 
the  most  but  a  slice  of  a  slice,  and  her  history  but  one 
of  the  aspects,  on  her  author's  part,  of  the  condition 
of  repleteness  against  the  postulate  of  the  entire  ade- 
quacy of  which  we  protest.  So  far  as  this  record  does 
affect  us  as  an  achieved  "extract,"  to  reiterate  our 
term,  that  result  abides  in  its  not  losing  its  centre, 
which  is  its  fidelity  to  the  one  question  of  her  dole- 
fully embarrassed  little  measure  of  life.  We  know  to 
that  extent  with  some  intensity  what  her  producer 
would  be  at,  yet  an  element  of  the  arbitrary  hangs  for 
us  about  the  particular  illustration — illustrations  leav- 
ing us  ever  but  half  appreciative  till  we  catch  that  one 
bright  light  in  which  they  give  out  all  they  contain. 
This  light  is  of  course  always  for  the  author  to  set 
somewhere.  Is  it  set  then  so  much  as  it  should  be 
in  "Sinister  Street,"  and  is  our  impression  of  the 
promise  of  this  recital  one  with  a  dawning  divination 
of  the  illustrative  card  that  Mr.  Mackenzie  may  still 
have  up  his  sleeve  and  that  our  after  sense  shall  recog- 
nise as  the  last  thing  left  on  the  table  ?  By  no  means, 
we  can  as  yet  easily  say,  for  if  a  boy's  experience  has 
ever  been  given  us  for  its  face  value  simply,  for  what 
it  is  worth  in  mere  recovered  intensity,  it  is  so  given 
us  here.  Of  all  the  saturations  it  can  in  fact  scarce 
have  helped  being  the  most  sufficient  in  itself,  for  it 


THE  NEW  NOVEL  361 

is  exactly,  where  it  is  best,  from  beginning  to  end  the 
remembered  and  reported  thing,  that  thing  alone,  that 
thing  existent  in  the  field  of  memory,  though  gaining 
value  too  from  the  applied  intelligence,  or  in  other 
words  from  the  lively  talent,  of  the  memoriser.  The 
memoriser  helps,  he  contributes,  he  completes,  and 
what  we  have  admired  in  him  is  that  in  the  case  of 
each  of  the  pearls  fished  up  by  his  dive — though  in- 
deed these  fruits  of  the  rummage  are  not  all  pearls— 
his  mind  has  had  a  further  iridescence  to  confer.  It 
is  the  fineness  of  the  iridescence  that  on  such  an  occa- 
sion matters,  and  this  appeal  to  our  interest  is  again 
and  again  on  Mr.  Compton  Mackenzie's  page  of  the 
happiest  and  the  brightest.  It  is  never  more  so  than 
when  we  catch  him,  as  we  repeatedly  do,  in  the  act 
of  positively  caring  for  his  expression  as  expression, 
positively  providing  for  his  phrase  as  a  fondly  fore- 
seeing parent  for  a  child,  positively  loving  it  in  the 
light  of  what  it  may  do  for  him — meeting  revelations, 
that  is,  in  what  it  may  do,  and  appearing  to  recognise 
that  the  value  of  the  offered  thing,  its  whole  relation 
to  us,  is  created  by  the  breath  of  language,  that  on 
such  terms  exclusively,  for  appropriation  and  enjoy- 
ment, we  know  it,  and  that  any  claimed  independence 
of  "form"  on  its  part  is  the  most  abject  of  fallacies. 
Do  these  things  mean  that,  moved  by  life,  this  inter- 
esting young  novelist  is  even  now  uncontrollably  on 
the  way  to  style  ?  We  might  cite  had  we  space  sev- 
eral symptoms,  the  very  vividest,  of  that  possibility; 
though  such  an  appearance  in  the  field  of  our  general 
survey  has  against  it  presumptions  enough  to  bring  us 
surely  back  to  our  original  contention — the  scant  de- 
gree in  which  that  field  has  ever  had  to  reckon  with 
criticism. 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER 

1895 

ONE  of  the  things  that  most  bring  home  his  time  of 
life  to  a  man  of  fifty  is  the  increase  of  the  rate  at 
which  he  loses  his  friends.  Some  one  dies  every  week, 
some  one  dies  every  day,  and  if  the  rate  be  high  among 
his  coevals  it  is  higher  still  in  the  generation  that,  on 
awaking  to  spectatorship,  he  found  in  possession  of  the 
stage.  He  begins  to  feel  his  own  world,  the  world  of 
his  most  vivid  impressions,  gradually  become  histor- 
ical. He  is  present,  and  closely  present,  at  the  proc- 
ess by  which  legend  grows  up.  He  sees  the  friends 
in  question  pictured  as  only  death  can  picture  them — 
a  master  superior  to  the  Rembrandts  and  Titians. 
They  have  been  of  many  sorts  and  many  degrees, 
they  have  been  private  and  public,  but  they  have  had 
in  common  that  they  were  the  furniture  of  this  first 
fresh  world,  the  world  in  which  associations  are  formed. 
That  one  by  one  they  go  is  what  makes  the  main  dif- 
ference in  it.  The  landscape  of  life,  in  foreground  and 
distance,  becomes,  as  the  painters  say,  another  com- 
position, another  subject;  and  quite  as  much  as  the 
objects  directly  under  our  eyes  we  miss  the  features 
that  have  educated  for  us  our  sense  of  proportion. 

Among  such  features  for  the  author  of  these  lines 
the  younger  Dumas,  who  has  just  passed  away,  was 
in  the  public  order  long  one  of  the  most  conspicuous. 
Suffused  as  he  is  already  with  the  quick  historic  haze, 
fixed,  for  whatever  term,  in  his  ultimate  value,  he  ap- 

362 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  363 

peals  to  me,  I  must  begin  by  declaring,  as  a  party  to 
one  of  these  associations  that  have  the  savour  of  the 
prime.  I  knew  him  only  in  his  work,  but  he  is  the 
object  of  an  old-time  sentiment  for  the  beginning  of 
which  I  have  to  go  back  absurdly  far.  He  arrived 
early— he  was  so  loudly  introduced  by  his  name.  I 
am  tempted  to  say  that  I  knew  him  when  he  was 
young,  but  what  I  suppose  I  mean  is  that  I  knew  him 
when  I  myself  was.  I  knew  him  indeed  when  we 
both  were,  for  I  recall  that  in  Paris,  in  distant  days 
and  undeveloped  conditions,  I  was  aware  with  per- 
haps undue  and  uncanny  precocity  of  his  first  successes. 
There  emerges  in  my  memory  from  the  night  of  time 
the  image  of  a  small  boy  walking  in  the  Palais  Royal 
with  innocent  American  girls  who  were  his  cousins  and 
wistfully  hearing  them  relate  how  many  times  (they 
lived  in  Paris)  they  had  seen  Madame  Doche  in  "La 
Dame  aux  Camelias"  and  what  floods  of  tears  she 
had  made  them  weep.  It  was  the  first  time  I  had 
heard  of  pockethandkerchiefs  as  a  provision  for  the 
play.  I  had  no  remotest  idea  of  the  social  position 
of  the  lady  of  the  expensive  flowers,  and  the  artless 
objects  of  my  envy  had,  in  spite  of  their  repeated 
privilege,  even  less  of  one;  but  her  title  had  a  strange 
beauty  and  her  story  a  strange  meaning — things  that 
ever  after  were  to  accompany  the  name  of  the  author 
with  a  faint  yet  rich  echo.  The  younger  Dumas,  after 
all,  was  then  not  only  relatively  but  absolutely  young; 
the  American  infants,  privileged  and  unprivileged,  were 
only  somewhat  younger;  the  former  going  with  their 
bonne,  who  must  have  enjoyed  the  adventure,  to  the 
"upper  boxes"  of  the  old  Vaudeville  of  the  Place  de 
la  Bourse,  where  later  on  I  remember  thinking  Ma- 
dame Fargueil  divine.  He  was  quite  as  fortunate 


364  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

moreover  in  his  own  designation  as  in  that  of  his  hero- 
ine; for  it  emphasised  that  bloom  of  youth  (I  don't 
say  bloom  of  innocence — a  very  different  matter)  which 
was  the  signal-note  of  the  work  destined,  in  the  world 
at  large,  to  bring  him  nine-tenths  of  his  celebrity. 

Written  at  twenty-five  "La  Dame  aux  Camelias" 
remains  in  its  combination  of  freshness  and  form,  of 
the  feeling  of  the  springtime  of  life  and  the  sense  of 
the  conditions  of  the  theatre,  a  singular,  an  astonish- 
ing production.  The  author  has  had  no  time  to  part 
with  his  illusions,  but  has  had  full  opportunity  to  mas- 
ter the  most  difficult  of  the  arts.  Consecrated  as  he 
was  to  this  mastery  he  never  afterwards  showed  greater 
adroitness  than  he  had  then  done  in  keeping  his  knowl- 
edge and  his  naivete  from  spoiling  each  other.  The 
play  has  been  blown  about  the  world  at  a  fearful  rate, 
but  it  has  never  lost  its  happy  juvenility,  a  charm 
that  nothing  can  vulgarise.  It  is  all  champagne  and 
tears — fresh  perversity,  fresh  credulity,  fresh  passion, 
fresh  pain.  We  have  each  seen  it  both  well  done  and 
ill  done,  and  perhaps  more  particularly  the  latter — in 
strange  places,  in  barbarous  tongues,  with  Marguerite 
Gautier  fat  and  Armand  Duval  old.  I  remember  ages 
ago  in  Boston  a  version  in  which  this  young  lady  and 
this  young  gentleman  were  represented  as  "engaged": 
that  indeed  for  all  I  know  may  still  be  the  form  in 
which  the  piece  most  enjoys  favour  with  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  public.  Nothing  makes  any  difference — it  car- 
ries with  it  an  April  air:  some  tender  young  man  and 
some  coughing  young  woman  have  only  to  speak  the 
lines  to  give  it  a  great  place  among  the  love-stories 
of  the  world.  I  recollect  coming  out  of  the  Gymnase 
one  night  when  Madame  Pierson  had  been  the  Mar- 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  365 

guerite — this  was  very  long  since — and  giving  myself 
up  on  the  boulevard  to  a  fine  critical  sense  of  what 
in  such  a  composition  was  flimsy  and  what  was  false. 
Somehow,  none  the  less,  my  fine  critical  sense  never 
prevented  my  embracing  the  next  opportunity  to  ex- 
pose it  to  the  same  irritation;  for  I  have  been,  I  am 
happy  to  think  to-day,  a  playgoer  who,  whatever  else 
he  may  have  had  on  his  conscience,  has  never  had  the 
neglect  of  any  chance  to  see  this  dramatist  acted. 
Least  of  all,  within  a  much  shorter  period,  has  it  un- 
dermined one's  kindness  to  have  had  occasion  to  ad- 
mire in  connection  with  the  piece  such  an  artist  for 
instance  as  Eleonora  Duse.  We  have  seen  Madame 
Duse  this  year  or  two  in  her  tattered  translation,  with 
few  advantages,  with  meagre  accessories  and  with  one 
side  of  the  character  of  the  heroine  scarcely  touched  at 
all — so  little  indeed  that  the  Italian  version  joins  hands 
with  the  American  and  the  relation  of  Marguerite  and 
Armand  seems  to  present  itself  as  a  question  of  the 
consecrated  even  if  not  approved  "union."  For  this 
interesting  actress,  however,  the  most  beautiful  thing 
is  always  the  great  thing,  and  her  performance — if  seen 
on  a  fortunate  evening — lives  in  the  mind  as  a  fine 
vindication  of  the  play.  I  am  not  sure  indeed  that 
it  is  the  very  performance  Dumas  intended;  but  he 
lived  long  enough  to  have  forgotten  perhaps  what  that 
performance  was.  He  might  on  some  sides,  I  think, 
have  accepted  Madame  Duse's  as  a  reminder. 

If  I  have  stopped  to  be  myself  so  much  reminded,  it 
is  because  after  and  outside  of  "La  Dame  aux  Came- 
lias"  Dumas  really  never  figured  among  us  all  again— 
a  circumstance  full  of  illustration  of  one  of  the  most 
striking  of  our  peculiarities,  the  capacity  for  granting 


366  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

a  prodigious  ear  to  some  one  manifestation  of  an  au- 
thor's talent  and  caring  nothing  whatever  for  the 
others.  It  is  solely  the  manifestation  and  never  the 
talent  that  interests  us,  and  nothing  is  stranger  than 
the  fact  that  no  critic  has  ever  explained  on  our  behalf 
the  system  by  which  we  hurl  ourselves  on  a  writer 
to-day  and  stare  at  him  to-morrow  as  if  we  had  never 
heard  of  him.  It  gives  us  the  air  of  perpetually  awak- 
ing from  mistakes,  but  it  renders  obscure  all  our  can- 
ons of  judgment.  A  great  force  makes  a  great  suc- 
cess, but  a  great  force  is  furthermore  no  less  a  great 
force  on  Friday  than  on  Monday.  Was  the  reader  a 
sorry  dupe  on  the  first  day,  or  is  the  writer  a  wanton 
sacrifice  on  the  second  ?  That  the  public  is  intelligent 
on  both  occasions  is  a  claim  it  can  scarcely  make:  it 
can  only  choose  between  having  its  acuteness  impugned 
or  its  manners  condemned.  At  any  rate  if  we  have  in 
England  and  the  United  States  only  the  two  alterna- 
tives of  the  roar  of  the  market  and  the  silence  of  the 
tomb  the  situation  is  apt  to  be  different  in  France, 
where  the  quality  that  goes  into  a  man's  work  and 
gives  it  an  identity  is  the  source  of  the  attention  ex- 
cited. It  happens  that  the  interest  in  the  play  of  the 
genius  is  greater  there  than  the  "boom"  of  the  par- 
ticular hit,  the  concern  primarily  for  the  author  rather 
than  the  subject,  instead  of,  as  among  ourselves,  pri- 
marily for  the  subject  rather  than  the  author.  Is  this 
because  the  French  have  been  acute  enough  to  reflect 
that  authors  comprehend  subjects,  but  that  subjects 
can  unfortunately  not  be  said  to  comprehend  authors  ? 
Literature  would  be  a  merry  game  if  the  business  were 
arranged  in  the  latter  fashion.  However  such  a  ques- 
tion may  be  answered,  Dumas  was  in  his  own  coun- 
try, to  the  end,  the  force  that,  save  in  connection 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  367 

with  his  first  play,  he  failed  to  become  elsewhere;  and 
if  he  was  there  much  the  most  original  worker  in  his 
field  one  of  the  incidental  signs  of  his  originality  was 
that,  despite  our  inveterate  practice,  in  theatrical  mat- 
ters, of  helping  ourselves  from  our  neighbour's  plate, 
he  was  inveterately  not  a  convenience  to  us.  We 
picked  our  morsels  from  the  plates  of  smaller  people — 
we  never  found  on  that  of  the  author  of  "Le  Fils 
Naturel"  any  we  could  swallow.  He  was  not  to  our 
poor  purpose,  and  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  this 
helps  a  little  to  give  his  artistic  measure.  It  would 
be  a  bad  note  for  him  now  if  we  had  found  him  amen- 
able to  that  graceless  game  of  which  we  show  signs 
to-day  of  having  grown  ashamed,  but  which  flourished 
for  years  in  two  imperturbable  communities  as  the  art 
of  theatrical  adaptation.  A  Dumas  adaptable  is  a 
Dumas  inconceivable;  and  in  point  of  fact  he  was 
touched  by  the  purveyors  of  the  English-speaking  stage 
only  to  prove  fatal  to  them.  If  the  history  of  so 
mean  a  traffic  as  the  one  here  glanced  at  were  worth 
writing  it  would  throw  light  on  some  odd  conceptions 
of  the  delicacy  in  the  abused  name  of  which  it  was 
carried  on.  It  is  all  to  the  honour  of  our  author's 
seriousness  that  he  was,  in  such  conditions,  so  unman- 
ageable; though  one  must  of  course  hasten  to  add 
that  this  seriousness  was  not  the  only  reason  of  it. 
There  were  several  others,  not  undiscoverable,  and  the 
effect  of  the  whole  combination  was,  in  view  of  the 
brilliant  fortune  of  his  productions  at  home  and  the 
eager  foraging  of  English  and  American  speculators, 
to  place  him  on  a  footing  all  his  own.  He  was  of 
active  interest  among  us  only  to  individual  observers 
—simply  as  one  of  the  most  devoted  of  whom  I  trace 
these  few  pages  of  commemoration. 


368  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

It  takes  some  analysis,  yet  is  not  impossible,  to  ex- 
plain why  among  the  men  of  his  time  to  whom  the 
creative  gift  had  been  granted  his  image,  for  sundry 
such  admirers,  always  presented  him  as  somehow  the 
happiest  consciousness.  They  were  perhaps  not  al- 
ways aware  of  it,  but  now  that  he  is  gone  they  have 
a  revelation  of  the  place  he  occupied  in  the  envious 
mind.  This  envy  flowed  doubtless,  to  begin  with, 
from  the  sense  of  his  extraordinarily  firm  grasp  of  his 
hard  refractory  art;  the  grasp  that  had  put  him  into 
possession  of  it  without  fumblings  or  gropings  made 
him  canter  away  on  the  back  of  it  the  moment  he  had 
touched  the  stirrup.  He  had  the  air  through  all  his 
career  of  a  man  riding  a  dangerous  horse  without  ever 
being  thrown.  Every  one  else  had  a  fall — he  alone 
never  really  quitted  the  saddle,  never  produced  a  play 
that  was  not  to  stay  to  be  revived  and  in  the  case  of 
his  comparative  failures  enjoy  some  sort  of  revenge, 
even  to  that  of  travelling  in  the  repertory  of  great 
actresses  round  the  globe.  Such  travels,  moreover, 
much  as  they  may  please  his  shade,  are  far  from  hav- 
ing been  the  only  felicities  of  his  long  career.  The 
others  strike  me  as  so  numerous  that  I  scarcely  indeed 
know  where  to  begin  to  reckon  them.  Greatly  even 
if  oddly  auspicious  for  instance  was  just  his  stark  son- 
ship  to  his  prodigious  father,  his  having  been  launched 
with  that  momentum  into  the  particular  world  in 
which  he  was  to  live.  It  was  a  privilege  to  make  up 
for  the  legal  irregularity  attaching  to  his  birth;  we 
think  of  it  really  almost  to  wonder  that  it  didn't  lift 
him  on  a  still  higher  wave.  His  limitations,  which 
one  encounters  with  a  sort  of  violence,  were  not  to  be 
overlooked;  it  expresses  them  in  some  degree  to  say 
that  he  was  bricked  up  in  his  hard  Parisianism,  but 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  369 

it  is  also  incontestable  that  some  of  them  were  much 
concerned  in  producing  his  firm  and  easy  equilibrium. 
We  understand,  however,  the  trap  they  set  for  him 
when  we  reflect  that  a  certain  omniscience,  a  great 
breadth  of  horizon,  may  well  have  seemed  to  him  to 
be  transmitted,  in  his  blood,  from  such  a  boundless 
fountain  of  life.  What  mattered  to  him  the  fact  of  a 
reach  of  reference  that  stopped  at  the  banlieue,  when 
experience  had  sat  at  his  cradle  in  the  shape  not  at 
all  of  a  fairy  godmother  but  of  an  immediate  progeni- 
tor who  was  at  once  fabulous  and  familiar  ?  He  had 
been  encompassed  by  all  history  in  being  held  in  such 
arms — it  was  an  entrance  into  possession  of  more  mat- 
ters than  he  could  even  guess  what  to  do  with.  The 
profit  was  all  the  greater  as  the  son  had  the  luxury  of 
differing  actively  from  the  father,  as  well  as  that  of 
actively  admiring  and,  in  a  splendid  sense,  on  all  the 
becoming  sides,  those  of  stature,  strength  and  health, 
vividly  reproducing  him.  He  had  in  relation  to  his 
special  gift,  his  mastery  of  the  dramatic  form,  a  faculty 
of  imagination  as  contracted  as  that  of  the  author  of 
"Monte  Cristo"  was  boundless,  but  his  moral  sense 
on  the  other  hand,  as  distinguished  from  that  of  his 
parent,  was  of  the  liveliest,  was  indeed  of  the  most 
special  and  curious  kind.  The  moral  sense  of  the  par- 
ent was  to  be  found  only  in  his  good  humour  and  his 
good  health — the  moral  sense  of  a  musketeer  in  love. 
This  lack  of  adventurous  vision,  of  the  long  flight  and 
the  joy  of  motion,  was  in  the  younger  genius  quite  one 
of  the  conditions  of  his  strength  and  luck,  of  his  fine 
assurance,  his  sharp  edge,  his  high  emphasis,  his  state 
untroubled  above  all  by  things  not  within  his  too  ir- 
regularly conditioned  ken.  The  things  close  about 
him  were  the  things  he  saw — there  were  alternatives, 


370  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

differences,  opposites,  of  which  he  lacked  so  much  as 
the  suspicion.  Nothing  contributes  more  to  the  prompt 
fortune  of  an  artist  than  some  such  positive  and  ex- 
clusive temper,  the  courage  of  his  convictions,  as  we 
usually  call  it,  the  power  to  neglect  something  thor- 
oughly, to  abound  aggressively  in  his  own  sense  and 
express  without  reserve  his  own  saturation.  The  sat- 
uration of  the  author  of  "Le  Demi-Monde"  was  never 
far  to  seek.  He  was  as  native  to  Paris  as  a  nectarine 
to  a  south  wall.  He  would  have  fared  ill  if  he  had 
not  had  a  great  gift  and  Paris  had  not  been  a  great 
city. 

It  was  another  element  of  the  happy  mixture  that 
he  came  into  the  world  at  the  moment  in  all  our  time 
that  was  for  a  man  of  letters  the  most  amusing  and 
beguiling — the  moment  exactly  when  he  could  see  the 
end  of  one  era  and  the  beginning  of  another  and  join 
hands  luxuriously  with  each.  This  was  an  advantage 
to  which  it  would  have  taken  a  genius  more  elastic  to 
do  full  justice,  but  which  must  have  made  him  feel 
himself  both  greatly  related  and  inspiringly  free.  He 
sprang  straight  from  the  lap  of  full-grown  romanti- 
cism; he  was  a  boy,  a  privileged  and  initiated  youth, 
when  his  father,  when  Victor  Hugo,  when  Lamartine 
and  Musset  and  Scribe  and  Michelet  and  Balzac  and 
George  Sand  were  at  the  high  tide  of  production.  He 
saw  them  all,  knew  them  all,  lived  with  them  and 
made  of  them  his  profit,  tasting  just  enough  of  the 
old  concoction  to  understand  the  proportions  in  which 
the  new  should  be  mixed.  He  had  above  all  in  his 
father,  for  the  purpose  that  was  in  him,  a  magnificent 
springboard — a  background  to  throw  into  relief,  as  a 
ruddy  sunset  seems  to  make  a  young  tree  doubly  bristle, 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  371 

a  profile  of  another  type.  If  it  was  not  indispensable 
it  was  at  any  rate  quite  poetic  justice  that  the  succes- 
sor to  the  name  should  be,  in  his  conditions,  the  great 
casuist  of  the  theatre.  He  had  seen  the  end  of  an 
age  of  imagination,  he  had  seen  all  that  could  be  done 
and  shown  in  the  way  of  mere  illustration  of  the  pas- 
sions. That  the  passions  are  always  with  us  is  a  fact 
he  had  not  the  smallest  pretension  to  shut  his  eyes  to 
—they  were  to  constitute  the  almost  exclusive  subject 
of  his  study.  But  he  was  to  study  them  not  for  the 
pleasure,  the  picture,  the  poetry  they  offer;  he  was 
to  study  them  in  the  interest  of  something  quite  out- 
side of  them,  about  which  the  author  of  "Antony" 
and  "Kean,"  about  which  Victor  Hugo  and  Musset, 
Scribe  and  Balzac  and  even  George  Sand  had  had 
almost  nothing  to  say.  He  was  to  study  them  from 
the  point  of  view  of  the  idea  of  the  right  and  the 
wrong,  of  duty  and  conduct,  and  he  was  to  this  end 
to  spend  his  artistic  life  with  them  and  give  a  new 
turn  to  the  theatre.  He  was  in  short  to  become,  on 
the  basis  of  a  determined  observation  of  the  manners 
of  his  time  and  country,  a  professional  moralist. 

There  can  scarcely  be  a  better  illustration  of  differ- 
ences of  national  habit  and  attitude  than  the  fact  that 
while  among  his  own  people  this  is  the  character,  as 
an  operative  force,  borne  by  the  author  of  "Le  Demi- 
Monde"  and  "Les  Idees  de  Madame  Aubray,"  so 
among  a  couple  of  others,  in  the  proportion  in  which 
his  reputation  there  has  emerged  from  the  vague,  his 
most  definite  identity  is  that  of  a  mere  painter  of  in- 
decent people  and  indecent  doings.  There  are,  as  I 
have  hinted,  several  reasons  for  the  circumstance  al- 
ready noted,  the  failure  of  the  attempt  to  domesti- 


372  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

cate  him  on  the  English-speaking  stage;  but  one  states 
the  case  fairly,  I  think,  in  saying  that  what  accounts 
for  half  of  it  is  our  passion,  in  the  presence  of  a  work 
of  art,  for  confounding  the  object,  as  the  philosophers 
have  it,  with  the  subject,  for  losing  sight  of  the  idea 
in  the  vehicle,  of  the  intention  in  the  fable.  Dumas 
is  a  dramatist  as  to  whom  nine  playgoers  out  of  ten 
would  precipitately  exclaim:  "Ah,  but  you  know, 
isn't  he  dreadfully  immoral?"  Such  are  the  lions  in 
the  path  of  reputation,  such  the  fate,  in  an  alien  air, 
of  a  master  whose  main  reproach  in  his  native  clime 
is  the  importunity  and  the  rigour  of  his  lesson.  The 
real  difference,  I  take  it,  is  that  whereas  we  like  to  be 
good  the  French  like  to  be  better.  We  like  to  be 
moral,  they  like  to  moralise.  This  helps  us  to  under- 
stand the  number  of  our  innocent  writers — writers  in- 
nocent even  of  reflection,  a  practice  of  course  essentially 
indelicate,  inasmuch  as  it  speedily  brings  us  face  to 
face  with  scandal  and  even  with  evil.  It  accounts 
doubtless  also  for  the  number  of  writers  on  the  fur- 
ther side  of  the  Channel  who  have  made  the  journey 
once  for  all  and  to  whom,  in  the  dangerous  quarter 
they  have  reached,  it  appears  of  the  very  nature  of 
scandal  and  evil  to  be  inquired  about.  The  whole 
undertaking  of  such  a  writer  as  Dumas  is,  according 
to  his  light,  to  carry  a  particular,  an  esthetic  form  of 
investigation  as  far  as  it  will  stretch — to  study,  and 
study  thoroughly,  the  bad  cases.  These  bad  cases 
were  precisely  what  our  managers  and  adapters,  our 
spectators  and  critics  would  have  nothing  to  do  with. 
It  defines  indeed  the  separation  that  they  should  have 
been,  in  the  light  in  which  he  presented  them,  pre- 
cisely what  made  them  for  his  own  public  exception- 
ally edifying.  One  of  his  great  contentions  is,  for 
instance,  that  seduced  girls  should  under  all  circum- 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  373 

stances  be  married — by  somebody  or  other,  failing  the 
seducer.  This  is  a  contention  that,  as  we  feel,  barely 
concerns  us,  shut  up  as  we  are  in  the  antecedent  con- 
viction that  they  should  under  no  circumstances  be  se- 
duced. He  meets  all  the  cases  that,  as  we  see  him,  we 
feel  to  have  been  spread  out  before  him;  meets  them 
successively,  systematically,  at  once  with  a  great  ear- 
nestness and  a  great  wit.  He  is  exuberantly  sincere: 
his  good  faith  sometimes  obscures  his  humour,  but 
nothing  obscures  his  good  faith.  So  he  gives  us  in 
their  order  the  unworthy  brides  who  must  be  de- 
nounced, the  prenuptial  children  who  must  be  adopted, 
the  natural  sons  who  must  be  avenged,  the  wavering 
ladies  who  must  be  saved,  the  credulous  fiances  who 
must  be  enlightened,  the  profligate  wives  who  must  be 
shot,  the  merely  blemished  ones  who  must  be  forgiven, 
the  too  vindictive  ones  who  must  be  humoured,  the 
venal  young  men  who  must  be  exposed,  the  unfaithful 
husbands  who  must  be  frightened,  the  frivolous  fa- 
thers who  must  be  pulled  up  and  the  earnest  sons  who 
must  pull  them.  To  enjoy  his  manner  of  dealing  with 
such  material  we  must  grant  him  in  every  connection 
his  full  premise:  that  of  the  importunity  of  the  phe- 
nomenon, the  ubiquity  of  the  general  plight,  the  plight 
in  which  people  are  left  by  an  insufficient  control  of  their 
passions.  We  must  grant  him  in  fact  for  his  didactic 
and  dramatic  purpose  a  great  many  things.  These 
things,  taken  together  and  added  to  some  others,  con- 
stitute the  luxurious  terms  on  which  I  have  spoken  of 
him  as  appearing  to  the  alien  admirer  to  have  prac- 
tised his  complicated  art. 

When  we  speak  of  the  passions  in  general  we  really 
mean,  for  the  most  part,  the  first  of  the  number,  the 
most  imperious  in  its  action  and  the  most  interesting 


374  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

in  its  consequences,  the  passion  that  unites  and  di- 
vides the  sexes.  It  is  the  passion,  at  any  rate,  to 
which  Dumas  as  dramatist  and  pamphleteer  mainly 
devoted  himself:  his  plays,  his  prefaces,  his  manifestos, 
his  few  tales  roll  exclusively  on  the  special  relation  of 
the  man  to  the  woman  and  the  woman  to  the  man,  and 
on  the  dangers  of  various  sorts,  even  that  of  ridicule, 
with  which  this  relation  surrounds  each  party.  This 
element  of  danger  is  what  I  have  called  the  general 
plight,  for  when  our  author  considers  the  sexes  as 
united  and  divided  it  is  with  the  predominance  of  the 
division  that  he  is  principally  struck.  It  is  not  an 
unfair  account  of  him  to  say  that  life  presented  itself 
to  him  almost  wholly  as  a  fierce  battle  between  the 
woman  and  the  man.  He  sides  now  with  one  and  now 
with  the  other;  the  former  combatant,  in  her  own 
country,  however,  was  far  from  pronouncing  him  sym- 
pathetic. His  subject  at  all  events  is  what  we  of  En- 
glish race  call  the  sexes  and  what  they  in  France  call 
the  sex.  To  talk  of  love  is  to  talk,  as  we  have  it,  of 
men  and  women;  to  talk  of  love  is,  as  the  French 
have  it,  to  -parler  femmes.  From  every  play  of  our 
author's  we  receive  the  impression  that  to  parler  femmes 
is  its  essential  and  innermost  purpose.  It  is  not  as- 
suredly singular  that  a  novelist,  a  dramatist  should 
talk  of  love,  or  even  should  talk  of  nothing  else:  what, 
in  addition  to  his  adroitness  and  his  penetration,  makes 
the  position  special  for  Dumas  is  that  he  talks  of  it— 
and  in  the  form  of  address  most  associated  with  pure 
diversion — altogether  from  the  anxious  point  of  view 
of  the  legislator  and  the  citizen. 

"Diane  de  Lys,"  which  immediately  followed  "La 
Dame  aux  Camelias,"  is,  so  far  as  I  can  recall  it,  a 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  375 

picture  pure  and  simple,  a  pretty  story,  as  we  say, 
sufficiently  romantic  and  rather  long-winded;  but  with 
"Le  Demi-Monde"  began  his  rich  argumentative  se- 
ries, concluding  only  the  other  day  with  "Denise"  and 
"Francillon,"  the  series  in  which  every  theme  is  a 
proposition  to  be  established  and  every  proposition  a 
form  of  duty  to  be  faced.  The  only  variation  that  I 
can  recollect  in  the  list  is  the  disinterested  portraiture 
of  "Le  Pere  Prodigue,"  with  its  remarkable  presenta- 
tion, in  the  figure  of  Albertine  de  la  Borde,  of  vice 
domesticated  and  thrifty,  keeping  early  hours  and 
books  in  double-entry,  and  its  remarkable  illustration, 
I  may  further  add,  of  all  that  was  the  reverse  of  in- 
fallible in  the  author's  power  to  distinguish  between 
amiable  infirmities  and  ugly  ones.  The  idea  on  which 
"Le  Pere  Prodigue"  rests  belongs  more  distinctively 
to  the  world  of  comedy  than  almost  any  other  situa- 
tion exhibited  in  the  series;  but  what  are  we  to  say 
of  the  selection,  for  comic  effect,  of  a  fable  of  which 
the  principal  feature  is  a  son's  not  unfounded  suspi- 
cion of  the  attitude  of  his  own  father  to  his  own  wife  ? 
The  father  is  the  image  of  a  nature  profusely  frivo- 
lous, but  we  scent  something  more  frivolous  still  in  the 
way  his  frivolity  is  disposed  of.  At  the  time  the  play 
was  produced  the  spectator  thought  himself  war- 
ranted in  recognising  in  this  picture  the  personal  char- 
acter (certainly  not  the  personal  genius)  of  the  elder 
Dumas.  If  the  spectator  was  so  warranted,  that  only 
helps,  I  think,  to  make  "Le  Pere  Prodigue"  a  stum- 
bling-block for  the  critic — make  it,  I  mean,  an  exhibi- 
tion of  the  author  off  his  guard  and  a  fact  to  be  taken 
into  account  in  an  estimate  of  his  moral  reach;  a  moral 
reach,  for  the  rest,  at  all  events,  never  impugned  by 
any  obliquity  in  facing  that  conception  of  the  duty 


376  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

imposed  which  it  is  the  main  source  of  the  writer's  in- 
terest in  the  figured  circumstances  that  they  may  be 
held  to  impose  it,  and  which  he  was  apt  to  set  forth 
more  dogmatically,  or  at  least  more  excitedly,  in  an 
occasional  and  polemical  pamphlet.  These  pamphlets, 
I  may  parenthetically  say,  strike  me  as  definitely 
compromising  to  his  character  as  artist.  What  shines 
in  them  most  is  the  appetite  for  a  discussion,  or  rather 
the  appetite  for  a  conclusion,  and  the  passion  for  a 
simplified  and  vindictive  justice.  But  I  have  never 
found  it  easy  to  forgive  a  writer  who,  in  possession  of 
a  form  capable  of  all  sorts  of  splendid  application, 
puts  on  this  resource  the  slight  of  using  substitutes  for 
it  at  will,  as  if  it  is  good  but  for  parts  of  the  cause. 
If  it  is  good  for  anything  it  is  good  for  the  whole  dem- 
onstration, and  if  it  is  not  good  for  the  whole  demon- 
stration it  is  good  for  nothing — nothing  that  he  is  con- 
cerned with.  If  the  picture  of  life  doesn't  cover  the 
ground  what  in  the  world  can  cover  it  ?  The  fault 
can  only  be  the  painter's.  Woe,  in  the  esthetic  line, 
to  any  example  that  requires  the  escort  of  precept.  It 
is  like  a  guest  arriving  to  dine  accompanied  by  con- 
stables. Our  author's  prefaces  and  treatises  show  a 
mistrust  of  disinterested  art.  He  would  have  declared 
probably  that  his  art  was  not  disinterested;  to  which 
our  reply  would  be  that  it  had  then  no  right  to  put 
us  ofF  the  scent  and  prepare  deceptions  for  us  by 
coming  within  an  ace  of  being  as  good  as  if  it  were. 

The  merits  of  the  play — that  is  of  the  picture,  in 
these  hands — are  sometimes  singularly  independent  of 
the  lesson  conveyed.  The  merits  of  the  lesson  con- 
veyed are  in  other  cases  much  more  incontestable  than 
those  of  the  picture,  than  the  production  of  the  air  of 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  377 

life  or  the  happiest  observance  of  the  conditions  of 
the  drama.  The  conclusion,  the  prescription,  of  "De- 
nise"  strikes  me  (to  give  an  instance)  as  singularly  fine, 
but  the  subject  belongs  none  the  less  to  the  hapless 
order  of  those  that  fail  to  profit  by  the  dramatic  form 
though  they  have  sacrificed  the  highest  advantages  of 
the  literary.  A  play — even  the  best — pays  so  tre- 
mendously by  what  it  essentially  can  not  do  for  the 
comparatively  little  it  practically  can,  that  a  mistake 
in  the  arithmetic  of  this  positive  side  speedily  pro- 
duces a  wide  deviation.  In  other  words  the  spectator, 
and  still  more  the  reader,  sees  such  a  theme  as  that 
of  "Denise,"  which  may  be  described  as  the  evolu- 
tion of  a  view,  presented  most  in  accordance  with  its 
nature  when  the  attempt  is  not  made  to  present  it  in 
accordance  with  the  nature  of  the  theatre.  It  is  the 
nature  of  the  theatre  to  give  its  victims,  in  exchange 
for  melancholy  concessions,  a  vision  of  the  immediate 
not  to  be  enjoyed  in  any  other  way;  and  consequently 
when  the  material  offered  it  to  deal  with  is  not  the 
immediate,  but  the  contingent,  the  derived,  the  hypo- 
thetic, our  melancholy  concessions  have  been  made  in 
vain  and  the  inadequacy  of  the  form  comes  out.  In 
"Francillon,"  partly  perhaps  because  the  thing  has 
nothing  to  do  with  anybody's  duty — least  of  all  with 
the  heroine's,  which  would  be  surely  to  keep  off  the 
streets — the  form  happens  to  be  remarkably  adequate. 
The  question  is  of  the  liberty  of  the  protagonist,  the 
right  of  a  wronged  and  indignant  wife  to  work  out  her 
husband's  chastisement  in  the  same  material  as  his 
sin,  work  it  out  moreover  on  the  spot,  as  a  blow  is 
repaid  by  a  blow,  exacting  an  eye  for  an  eye  and  a 
tooth  for  a  tooth.  The  play  has  all  the  kinds  of  life 
that  the  theatre  can  achieve,  because  in  the  first  place 


378  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Dumas,  though  acting  as  the  wife's  advocate,  has  had 
the  intelligence  to  give  us  a  solution  which  is  only  a 
scenic  sequence  and  not  a  real,  still  less  a  "philosophic," 
one;  and  because  in  the  second  it  deals  with  emotions 
and  impulses,  which  can  be  shown  by  the  short  mea- 
sure, and  not  with  reflections  and  aspirations,  which 
can  be  shown  but  by  the  long. 

I  am  not  pretending  to  take  things  in  turn,  but  a 
critic  with  a  generous  memory  of  the  spell  of  Dumas 
should  not,  however  pressed,  neglect  to  strain  a  point 
for  "Le  Demi-Monde."  I  doubt  my  competence,  how- 
ever, to  consider  that  admirable  work  scientifically — I 
find  myself  too  condemned  to  consider  it  sentimen- 
tally. A  critic  is  lost,  as  a  critic,  from  the  moment  his 
feeling  about  the  worse  parts  of  the  matter  he  investi- 
gates fails  to  differ  materially  from  his  feeling  about 
the  better.  That  is  an  attitude  even  less  enlightened 
than  being  unconscious  of  the  blemishes;  all  the  same 
it  must  serve  me  for  the  present  case.  I  am  perfectly 
aware  that  Olivier  de  Jalin  is  a  man  of  no  true  deli- 
cacy; in  spite  of  which  I  take  when  I  see  them  rep- 
resented the  liveliest  interest  in  his  proceedings.  I  am 
perfectly  aware  that  Madame  d'Ange,  with  her  calme 
infernal,  as  George  Sand  calls  it,  is  tainted  and  tortu- 
ous; in  spite  of  which  my  imagination  quite  warms  to 
Madame  d'Ange.  Perhaps  I  should  indeed  rather  say 
that  this  interest  and  this  sympathy  have  for  their 
object  the  great  total  of  the  play.  It  is  the  member 
of  the  series  in  which  Dumas  first  took  up  the  scales 
in  one  hand  and  the  sword  in  the  other,  and  it  is  a 
wonderful  piece  of  work,  wonderful  in  kind  of  matu- 
rity, for  a  man  of  thirty.  It  has  all  the  easy  ampli- 
tude we  call  authority.  I  won't  pretend  to  say  what 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  379 

I  think,  here,  of  the  author's  justice,  and  if  I  happen 
to  think  ill  of  it  I  won't  pretend  to  care.  I  see  the 
thing  through  too  many  old  memories,  old  echoes,  old 
charms.  In  the  light  of  the  admirable  acting  of  an- 
cient days,  of  the  faded  image  of  the  exquisite  Des- 
clee,  of  a  dim  recollection  even  of  the  prehistoric  Rose 
Cheri  and  of  Mademoiselle  Delaporte,  it  represents  too 
many  of  the  reasons  why  I  saw  him  always  ideally 
triumphant.  To  practise  an  art  which  for  its  full,  its 
rich  effect  depended  on  interpretation,  and  to  be  able 
to  do  one's  work  with  an  eye  on  interpretation  of  that 
quality — this  had  in  common  with  supreme  bliss  the 
element  at  any  rate  of  being  attainable  only  by  the 
elect.  It  partook  of  a  peace  the  world  cannot  give. 
To  be  a  moralist  with  the  aid  of  Croizette,  a  philos- 
opher with  the  aid  of  Delaunay,  an  Academician,  even, 
with  the  aid  of  Bartet — such  things  suggested  an  al- 
most equivocal  union  of  virtue  and  success.  One  had 
never  seen  virtue  so  agreeable  to  one's  self,  nor  suc- 
cess so  useful  to  others.  One  had  never  seen  a  play 
that  was  a  model  so  alive  in  spite  of  it.  Models  in 
the  theatre  were  apt  to  be  dead  and  vivacities  vulgar. 
One  had  never  above  all  seen  on  the  stage  a  picture 
so  conformable  to  deep  pictorial  art,  a  drama  so  lib- 
erally, gradually,  scientifically  flushed  with  its  action. 
Beautiful  in  "Le  Demi-Monde"  is  the  way  the  sub- 
ject quietly,  steadily,  strongly  expands  from  within. 

It  was  always  the  coercive  force  that  his  tone  gave 
one  the  strongest  sense  of  life,  and  it  remains  the  in- 
teresting thing  that  this  element  in  Dumas  abounds 
in  spite  of  not  being  fed  from  the  source  that  we  usu- 
ally assume  to  be  the  richest.  It  was  not  fed  from  the 
imagination,  for  his  imagination,  by  no  means  of  the 


38o  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

great  plastic  sort,  has  left  us  a  comparatively  small 
heritage  of  typical  figures.  His  characters  are  all 
pointed  by  observation,  they  are  clear  notes  in  the 
concert,  but  not  one  of  them  has  known  the  little  in- 
visible push  that,  even  when  shyly  and  awkwardly  ad- 
ministered, makes  the  puppet,  in  spite  of  the  string, 
walk  off  by  himself  and  quite  "cut,"  if  the  mood  take 
him,  that  distant  relation  his  creator.  They  are  al- 
ways formal  with  this  personage  and  thoroughly  con- 
scious and  proud  of  him;  there  is  a  charm  of  mys- 
tery and  poetry  and  oddity,  a  glory  of  unexpectedness, 
that  they  consistently  lack.  Their  life,  and  that,  in 
each  case,  of  the  whole  story  (quite  the  most  wonder- 
ful part  of  this)  is  simply  the  author's  own  life,  his 
high  vitality,  his  very  presence  and  temperament  and 
voice.  They  do  more  for  him  even  than  they  do  for 
the  subject,  and  he  himself  is  at  last  accordingly  the 
most  vivid  thing  in  every  situation.  He  keeps  it  at 
arm's  length  because  he  has  the  instinct  of  the  drama- 
tist and  the  conscience  of  the  artist,  but  we  feel  all  the 
while  that  his  face  is  bigger  than  his  mask.  Nothing 
about  his  work  is  more  extraordinary  than  this  man- 
ner in  which  his  personality  pervades  without  spoiling 
it  the  most  detached  and  most  impersonal  of  literary 
forms.  The  reasons  for  such  an  impunity  are  first 
that  his  precautions,  the  result  of  a  great  intelligence, 
were  so  effective,  and  second  that  his  personality,  the 
result  of  a  great  affiliation,  was  so  robust.  It  may  be 
said  that  the  precautions  were  not  effective  if  the 
man  himself  was  what  one  most  enjoyed  in  the  play. 
The  only  answer  to  that  can  be  that  I  speak  merely 
for  myself  and  for  the  fresher  sensibility  of  the  happy 
time.  Other  admirers  found  certainly  other  things; 
what  I  found  most  was  a  tall  figure  in  muscular  mo- 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  381 

tion  and  the  sense  of  a  character  that  had  made  ad- 
mirably free  with  life.  If  it  was  mainly  as  an  un- 
abashed observer  that  he  had  made  free,  and  if  the 
life  supplied  was  much  of  it  uncommonly  queer,  that 
never  diminished  the  action  of  his  hard  masculinity 
and  his  fine  intellectual  brutality.  There  was  an  easy 
competence  in  it  all,  and  a  masterful  experience,  and 
a  kind  of  vicarious  courage.  In  particular  there  was  a 
real  genius  for  putting  all  persons — especially  all  bad 
ones — very  much  in  their  place.  Then  it  was  all,  for 
another  bribe,  so  copious  and  so  close,  so  sustained 
and  so  quiet,  with  such  fascinating  unities  and  com- 
plex simplicities  and  natural  solutions.  It  was  the 
breath  of  the  world  and  the  development  of  an  art. 

All  the  good,  however,  that  I  recollect  thinking  of 
Dumas  only  reminds  me  how  little  I  desired  that  my 
remarks  in  general  should  lead  me  into  vain  discrim- 
inations. There  are  some  indeed  that  are  not  vain— 
at  least  they  help  us  to  understand.  He  has  a  noble 
strain  of  force,  a  fulness  of  blood  that  has  permitted 
him  to  be  tapped  without  shrinking.  We  must  speak 
of  him  in  the  present  tense,  as  we  always  speak  of  the 
masters.  The  theatre  of  his  time,  wherever  it  has 
been  serious,  has  on  the  ground  of  general  method 
lived  on  him;  wherever  it  has  not  done  so  it  has  not 
lived  at  all.  To  pretend  to  be  too  shocked  to  profit 
by  him  was  a  way  of  covering  up  its  levity,  but  there 
was  no  escaping  its  fate.  He  was  the  kind  of  artistic 
influence  that  is  as  inevitable  as  a  medical  specific: 
you  may  decline  it  from  black  bottle  to-day — you  will 
take  it  from  a  green  bottle  to-morrow.  The  energy 
that  went  forth  blooming  as  Dumas  has  come  back 
grizzled  as  Ibsen,  and  would  under  the  latter  form,  I 


382  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

am  sure,  very  freely  acknowledge  its  debt.  A  critic 
whose  words  meet  my  eyes  as  I  write  very  justly  says 
that:  "Just  as  we  have  the  novel  before  Balzac  and 
the  novel  after  Balzac,  the  poetry  that  preceded  Victor 
Hugo  and  the  poetry  that  followed  him,  so  we  have 
the  drama  before  Alexandre  Dumas  and  the  drama 
after  him."  He  has  left  his  strong  hand  upon  it;  he 
remodelled  it  as  a  vehicle,  he  refreshed  it  as  an  art. 
His  passion  for  it  was  obviously  great,  but  there  would 
be  a  high  injustice  to  him  in  not  immediately  adding 
that  his  interest  in  the  material  it  dealt  with,  in  his 
subject,  his  question,  his  problem,  was  greater  still 
than  this  joy  of  the  craftsman.  That  might  well  be, 
but  there  are  celebrated  cases  in  which  it  has  not 
been.  The  largest  quality  in  Dumas  was  his  immense 
concern  about  life — his  sense  of  human  character  and 
human  fate  as  commanding  and  controllable  things. 
To  do  something  on  their  behalf  was  paramount  for 
him,  and  what  to  do  in  his  own  case  clear:  what  else 
but  act  upon  the  conscience  as  violently  as  he  could, 
and  with  the  remarkable  weapons  that  Providence  had 
placed  within  his  grasp  and  for  which  he  was  to  show 
his  gratitude  by  a  perfectly  intrepid  application  ? 
These  weapons  were  three:  a  hard  rare  wit,  not  lam- 
bent like  a  flame,  but  stiff  and  straight  like  an  arrow 
from  a  crossbow;  a  perception  not  less  rare  of  some 
of  the  realities  of  the  particular  human  tendency  about 
which  most  falsities  have  clustered;  and  lastly  that 
native  instinct  for  the  conditions  of  dramatic  presen- 
tation without  which  any  attempt  to  meet  them  is  a 
helpless  groping. 

It  must  always  be  remembered  of  him  that  he  was 
the  observer  of  a  special  order  of  things,  the  moralist 


DUMAS  THE  YOUNGER  383 

of  a  particular  relation  as  the  umpire  of  a  yacht-race 
is  the  legislator  of  a  particular  sport.  His  vision  and 
his  talent,  as  I  have  said,  were  all  for  the  immediate, 
for  the  manners  and  the  practices  he  himself  was 
drenched  with:  he  had  none  of  the  faculty  that  scents 
from  afar,  that  wings  away  and  dips  beyond  the  hori- 
zon. There  are  moments  when  a  reader  not  of  his 
own  race  feels  that  he  simplifies  almost  absurdly. 
There  are  too  many  things  he  didn't  after  all  guess, 
too  many  cases  he  didn't  after  all  provide  for.  He 
has  a  certain  odour  of  bad  company  that  almost  im- 
perils his  distinction.  This  was  doubtless  the  deep- 
est of  the  reasons  why  among  ourselves  he  flourished 
so  scantly:  we  felt  ourselves  to  be  of  a  world  in  which 
the  elements  were  differently  mixed,  the  proportions 
differently  marked,  so  that  the  tables  of  our  law  would 
have  to  be  differently  graven.  His  very  earnestness 
was  only  a  hindrance — he  might  have  had  more  to 
say  to  us  if  he  had  consented  to  have  less  application. 
This  produced  the  curious  dryness,  the  obtrusive  econ- 
omy of  his  drama — the  hammered  sharpness  of  every 
outline,  the  metallic  ring  of  every  sound.  His  ter- 
rible knowledge  suggested  a  kind  of  uniform — gilt  but- 
tons, a  feathered  hat  and  a  little  official  book;  it  was 
almost  like  an  irruption  of  the  police.  The  most  gen- 
eral masters  are  the  poets,  with  all  the  things  they 
blessedly  don't  hold  for  so  very  certain  and  all  the 
things  they  blessedly  and  preferably  invent.  It  is 
true  that  Dumas  was  splendid,  in  his  way,  exactly 
because  he  was  not  vague:  his  concentration,  all  con- 
fidence and  doctrine  and  epigram,  is  the  explanation  of 
his  extraordinary  force.  That  force  is  his  abiding 
quality:  one  feels  that  he  was  magnificently  a  man- 
that  he  stands  up  high  and  sees  straight  and  speaks 


384  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

loud.  It  is  his  great  temperament,  undiminished  by 
what  it  lacks,  that  endears  him  to  his  admirers.  It 
made  him  still  of  the  greater  race  and  played  well  its 
part  in  its  time — so  well  that  one  thinks  of  him  finally 
as  perhaps  not,  when  all  is  said,  of  the  very  happiest 
group,  the  group  of  those  for  whom  in  the  general  af- 
fection there  is  yet  more  to  come.  He  had  an  im- 
mense reverberation — he  practised  the  art  that  makes 
up  for  being  the  most  difficult  by  being  the  most  ac- 
claimed. There  is  no  postponed  poetic  justice  for 
those  who  have  had  everything.  He  was  seconded  in 
a  manner  that  must  have  made  success  a  double  de- 
light. There  are  indications  that  the  dramatist  of  the 
future  will  be  less  and  less  elated.  He  may  well  be- 
come so  if  he  is  to  see  himself  less  and  less  interpreted. 


THE  NOVEL  IN  "THE   RING  AND  THE 
BOOK"1 

1912 

IF  on  such  an  occasion  as  this — even  with  our  natural 
impulse  to  shake  ourselves  free  of  reserves — some  sharp 
choice  between  the  dozen  different  aspects  of  one  of 
the  most  copious  of  our  poets  becomes  a  prime  neces- 
sity, though  remaining  at  the  same  time  a  great  diffi- 
culty, so  in  respect  to  the  most  voluminous  of  his 
works  the  admirer  is  promptly  held  up,  as  we  have 
come  to  call  it;  finds  himself  almost  baffled  by  alter- 
natives. "The  Ring  and  the  Book"  is  so  vast  and  so 
essentially  gothic  a  structure,  spreading  and  soaring 
and  branching  at  such  a  rate,  covering  such  ground, 
putting  forth  such  pinnacles  and  towers  and  brave  ex- 
crescences, planting  its  transepts  and  chapels  and  por- 
ticos, its  clustered  hugeness  or  inordinate  muchness, 
that  with  any  first  approach  we  but  walk  vaguely  and 
slowly,  rather  bewilderedly,  round  and  round  it,  won- 
dering at  what  point  we  had  best  attempt  such  en- 
trance as  will  save  our  steps  and  light  our  uncertainty, 
most  enable  us  to  reach  our  personal  chair,  our  indi- 
cated chapel  or  shrine,  when  once  within.  For  it  is  to 
be  granted  that  to  this  inner  view  the  likeness  of  the 
literary  monument  to  one  of  the  great  religious  gives 

'Address  delivered  before  the  Academic  Committee  of  the  Royal  Society 
of  Literature  in  Commemoration  of  the  Centenary  of  Robert  Browning, 
May  7,  1912. 

385 


386  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

way  a  little,  sustains  itself  less  than  in  the  first,  the 
affronting  mass;  unless  we  simply  figure  ourselves, 
under  the  great  roof,  looking  about  us  through  a  splen- 
did thickness  and  dimness  of  air,  an  accumulation  of 
spiritual  presences  or  unprofaned  mysteries,  that  makes 
our  impression  heavily  general — general  only — and 
leaves  us  helpless  for  reporting  on  particulars.  The 
particulars  for  our  purpose  have  thus  their  identity 
much  rather  in  certain  features  of  the  twenty  faces — 
either  of  one  or  of  another  of  these — that  the  struc- 
ture turns  to  the  outer  day  and  that  we  can,  as  it 
were,  sit  down  before  and  consider  at  our  comparative 
ease.  I  say  comparative  advisedly,  for  I  cling  to  the 
dear  old  tradition  that  Browning  is  "  difficult " — which 
we  were  all  brought  up  on  and  which  I  think  we  should, 
especially  on  a  rich  retrospective  day  like  this,  with 
the  atmosphere  of  his  great  career  settling  upon  us  as 
much  as  possible,  feel  it  a  shock  to  see  break  down 
in  too  many  places  at  once.  Selecting  my  ground,  by 
your  kind  invitation,  for  sticking  in  and  planting  be- 
fore you,  to  flourish  so  far  as  it  shall,  my  little  sprig 
of  bay,  I  have  of  course  tried  to  measure  the  quantity 
of  ease  with  which  our  material  may  on  that  noted 
spot  allow  itself  to  be  treated.  There  are  innumer- 
able things  in  "The  Ring  and  the  Book" — as  the 
comprehensive  image  I  began  with  makes  it  needless 
I  should  say;  and  I  have  been  above  all  appealed  to 
by  the  possibility  that  one  of  these,  pursued  for  a 
while  through  the  labyrinth,  but  at  last  overtaken  and 
then  more  or  less  confessing  its  identity,  might  have 
yielded  up  its  best  essence  as  a  grateful  theme  under 
some  fine  strong  economy  of  prose  treatment.  So  here 
you  have  me  talking  at  once  of  prose  and  seeking 
that  connection  to  help  out  my  case. 


"THE   RING   AND  THE   BOOK"        387 

From  far  back,  from  my  first  reading  of  these  vol- 
umes, which  took  place  at  the  time  of  their  disclosure 
to  the  world,  when  I  was  a  fairly  young  person,  the 
sense,  almost  the  pang,  of  the  novel  they  might  have 
constituted  sprang  sharply  from  them;  so  that  I  was 
to  go  on  through  the  years  almost  irreverently,  all  but 
quite  profanely  if  you  will,  thinking  of  the  great  loose 
and  uncontrolled  composition,  the  great  heavy-hanging 
cluster  of  related  but  unreconciled  parts,  as  a  fiction 
of  the  so-called  historic  type,  that  is  as  a  suggested 
study  of  the  manners  and  conditions  from  which  our 
own  have  more  or  less  traceably  issued,  just  tragically 
spoiled — or  as  a  work  of  art,  in  other  words,  smoth- 
ered in  the  producing.  To  which  I  hasten  to  add  my 
consciousness  of  the  scant  degree  in  which  such  a 
fresh  start  from  our  author's  documents,  such  a  re- 
projection  of  them,  wonderful  documents  as  they  can 
only  have  been,  may  claim  a  critical  basis.  Conceive 
me  as  simply  astride  of  my  different  fancy,  my  other 
dream,  of  the  matter — which  bolted  with  me,  as  I  have 
said,  at  the  first  alarm. 

Browning  worked  in  this  connection  literally  upon 
documents;  no  page  of  his  long  story  is  more  vivid  and 
splendid  than  that  of  his  find  of  the  Book  in  the  Utter 
of  a  market-stall  in  Florence  and  the  swoop  of  prac- 
tised perception  with  which  he  caught  up  in  it  a  trea- 
sure. Here  was  a  subject  stated  to  the  last  ounce  of 
its  weight,  a  living  and  breathing  record  of  facts  pitiful 
and  terrible,  a  mass  of  matter  bristling  with  revela- 
tions and  yet  at  the  same  time  wrapped  over  with 
layer  upon  layer  of  contemporary  appreciation;  which 
appreciation,  in  its  turn,  was  a  part  of  the  wealth  to 
be  appreciated.  What  our  great  master  saw  was  his 


388  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

situation  founded,  seated  there  in  positively  packed 
and  congested  significance,  though  by  just  so  much  as 
it  was  charged  with  meanings  and  values  were  those 
things  undeveloped  and  unexpressed.  They  looked  up 
at  him,  even  in  that  first  flush  and  from  their  market- 
stall,  and  said  to  him,  in  their  compressed  compass,  as 
with  the  muffled  rumble  of  a  slow-coming  earthquake, 
"Express  us,  express  us,  immortalise  us  as  we'll  im- 
mortalise you!" — so  that  the  terms  of  the  understand- 
ing were  so  far  cogent  and  clear.  It  was  an  under- 
standing, on  their  side,  with  the  poet;  and  since  that 
poet  had  produced  "Men  and  Women,"  "Dramatic 
Lyrics,"  "Dramatis  Personae"  and  sundry  plays — we 
needn't  even  foist  on  him  "Sordello" — he  could  but 
understand  in  his  own  way.  That  way  would  have 
had  to  be  quite  some  other,  we  fully  see,  had  he  been 
by  habit  and  profession  not  just  the  lyric,  epic,  dra- 
matic commentator,  the  extractor,  to  whatever  essen- 
tial potency  and  redundancy,  of  the  moral  of  the  fable, 
but  the  very  fabulist  himself,  the  inventor  and  pro- 
jector, layer  down  of  the  postulate  and  digger  of  the 
foundation.  I  doubt  if  we  have  a  precedent  for  this 
energy  of  appropriation  of  a  deposit  of  stated  matter, 
a  block  of  sense  already  in  position  and  requiring  not 
to  be  shaped  and  squared  and  caused  any  further  to 
solidify,  but  rather  to  suffer  disintegration,  be  pulled 
apart,  melted  down,  hammered,  by  the  most  char- 
acteristic of  the  poet's  processes,  to  powder — dust  of 
gold  and  silver,  let  us  say.  He  was  to  apply  to  it  his 
favourite  system — that  of  looking  at  his  subject  from 
the  point  of  view  of  a  curiosity  almost  sublime  in  its 
freedom,  yet  almost  homely  in  its  method,  and  of 
smuggling  as  many  more  points  of  view  together  into 
that  one  as  the  fancy  might  take  him  to  smuggle,  on 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        389 

a  scale  on  which  even  he  had  never  before  applied  it; 
this  with  a  courage  and  a  confidence  that,  in  presence  of 
all  the  conditions,  conditions  many  of  them  arduous 
and  arid  and  thankless  even  to  defiance,  we  can  only 
pronounce  splendid,  and  of  which  the  issue  was  to  be 
of  a  proportioned  monstrous  magnificence. 

The  one  definite  forecast  for  this  product  would 
have  been  that  it  should  figure  for  its  producer  as  a 
poem — as  if  he  had  simply  said,  "I  embark  at  any  rate 
for  the  Golden  Isles";  everything  else  was  of  the  pure 
incalculable,  the  frank  voyage  of  adventure.  To  what 
extent  the  Golden  Isles  were  in  fact  to  be  reached  is  a 
matter  we  needn't  pretend,  I  think,  absolutely  to  de- 
termine; let  us  feel  for  ourselves  and  as  we  will  about 
it — either  see  our  adventurer,  disembarked  bag  and 
baggage  and  in  possession,  plant  his  flag  on  the  highest 
eminence  within  his  circle  of  sea,  or,  on  the  other  hand, 
but  watch  him  approach  and  beat  back  a  little,  tack 
and  turn  and  stand  off,  always  fairly  in  sight  of  land, 
catching  rare  glimpses  and  meeting  strange  airs,  but 
not  quite  achieving  the  final  coup  that  annexes  the 
group.  He  returns  to  us  under  either  view  all  scented 
and  salted  with  his  measure  of  contact,  and  that  for 
the  moment  is  enough  for  us — more  than  enough  for 
me  at  any  rate,  engaged  for  your  beguilement  in  this 
practical  relation  of  snuffing  up  what  he  brings.  He 
brings,  however  one  puts  it,  a  detailed  report,  which  is 
but  another  word  for  a  story;  and  it  is  with  his  story, 
his  offered,  not  his  borrowed  one — a  very  different 
matter — that  I  am  concerned.  We  are  probably  most 
of  us  so  aware  of  its  general  content  that  if  I  sum  this 
up  I  may  do  so  briefly.  The  Book  of  the  Florentine 
rubbish-heap  is  the  full  account  (as  full  accounts  were 


390  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

conceived  in  those  days)  of  the  trial  before  the  Roman 
courts,  with  inquiries  and  judgments  by  the  Tuscan 
authorities  intermixed,  of  a  certain  Count  Guido  Fran- 
ceschini  of  Arezzo,  decapitated,  in  company  with  four 
confederates — these  latter  hanged — on  February  22, 
1698,  for  the  murder  of  his  young  wife  Pompilia  Com- 
parini  and  her  ostensible  parents,  Pietro  and  Violante 
of  that  ilk. 

The  circumstances  leading  to  this  climax  were  pri- 
marily his  marriage  to  Pompilia,  some  years  before,  in 
Rome — she  being  then  but  in  her  thirteenth  year — 
under  the  impression,  fostered  in  him  by  the  elder  pair, 
that  she  was  their  own  child  and  on  this  head  heiress 
to  moneys  settled  on  them  from  of  old  in  the  event  of 
their  having  a  child.  They  had  in  fact  had  none,  and 
had,  in  substitution,  invented,  so  to  speak,  Pompilia, 
the  luckless  base-born  baby  of  a  woman  of  lamentable 
character  easily  induced  to  part  with  her  for  cash. 
They  bring  up  the  hapless  creature  as  their  daughter, 
and  as  their  daughter  they  marry  her,  in  Rome,  to  the 
middle-aged  and  impecunious  Count  Guido,  a  rapa- 
cious and  unscrupulous  fortune-seeker  by  whose  su- 
perior social  position,  as  we  say,  dreadfully  decaduto 
though  he  be,  they  are  dazzled  out  of  all  circumspec- 
tion. The  girl,  innocent,  ignorant,  bewildered,  scared 
and  purely  passive,  is  taken  home  by  her  husband  to 
Arezzo,  where  she  is  at  first  attended  by  Pietro  and 
Violante  and  where  the  direst  disappointment  await 
the  three.  Count  Guido  proves  the  basest  of  men  and 
his  home  a  place  of  terror  and  of  torture,  from  which  at 
the  age  of  seventeen,  and  shortly  prior  to  her  giving 
birth  to  an  heir  to  the  house,  such  as  it  is,  she  is  res- 
cued by  a  pitying  witness  of  her  misery,  Canon  Capon- 


"THE   RING  AND  THE  BOOK"        391 

sacchi,  a  man  of  the  world  and  adorning  it,  yet  in  holy 
orders,  as  men  of  the  world  in  Italy  might  then  be,  who 
clandestinely  helps  her,  at  peril  of  both  their  lives,  back 
to  Rome,  and  of  whom  it  is  attested  that  he  has  had 
no  other  relation  with  her  but  this  of  distinguished  and 
all-disinterested  friend  in  need.  The  pretended  parents 
have  at  an  early  stage  thrown  up  their  benighted  game, 
fleeing  from  the  rigour  of  their  dupe's  domestic  rule, 
disclosing  to  him  vindictively  the  part  they  have  played 
and  the  consequent  failure  of  any  profit  to  him  through 
his  wife,  and  leaving  him  in  turn  to  wreak  his  spite, 
which  has  become  infernal,  on  the  wretched  Pompilia. 
He  pursues  her  to  Rome,  on  her  eventual  flight,  and 
overtakes  her,  with  her  companion,  just  outside  the 
gates;  but  having,  by  the  aid  of  the  local  powers,  re- 
achieved  possession  of  her,  he  contents  himself  for  the 
time  with  procuring  her  sequestration  in  a  convent, 
from  which,  however,  she  is  presently  allowed  to  emerge 
in  view  of  the  near  birth  of  her  child.  She  rejoins 
Pietro  and  Violante,  devoted  to  her,  oddly  enough, 
through  all  their  folly  and  fatuity;  and  under  their 
roof,  in  a  lonely  Roman  suburb,  her  child  comes  into 
the  world.  Her  husband  meanwhile,  hearing  of  her 
release,  gives  way  afresh  to  the  fury  that  had  not  at 
the  climax  of  his  former  pursuit  taken  full  effect;  he 
recruits  a  band  of  four  of  his  young  tenants  or  farm- 
labourers  and  makes  his  way,  armed,  like  his  com- 
panions, with  knives,  to  the  door  behind  which  three 
of  the  parties  to  all  the  wrong  done  him,  as  he  holds, 
then  lurk.  He  pronounces,  after  knocking  and  wait- 
ing, the  name  of  Caponsacchi;  upon  which,  as  the 
door  opens,  Violante  presents  herself.  He  stabs  her 
to  death  on  the  spot  with  repeated  blows — like  her 
companions  she  is  off  her  guard;  and  he  throws  him- 


392  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

self  on  each  of  these  with  equal  murderous  effect. 
Pietro,  crying  for  mercy,  falls  second  beneath  him; 
after  which  he  attacks  his  wife,  whom  he  literally 
hacks  to  death.  She  survives,  by  a  miracle,  long 
enough,  in  spite  of  all  her  wounds,  to  testify;  which 
testimony,  as  may  be  imagined,  is  not  the  least  pre- 
cious part  of  the  case.  Justice  is  on  the  whole,  though 
deprecated  and  delayed,  what  we  call  satisfactory;  the 
last  word  is  for  the  Pope  in  person,  Innocent  XII. 
Pignatelli,  at  whose  deliberation,  lone  and  supreme, 
on  Browning's  page,  we  splendidly  assist;  and  Count 
Guido  and  his  accomplices,  bloodless  as  to  the  act 
though  these  appear  to  have  been,  meet  their  dis- 
criminated doom. 

That  is  the  bundle  of  facts,  accompanied  with  the 
bundle  of  proceedings,  legal,  ecclesiastical,  diplomatic 
and  other,  on  the  facts,  that  our  author,  of  a  sum- 
mer's day,  made  prize  of;  but  our  general  tempta- 
tion, as  I  say — out  of  which  springs  this  question  of 
the  other  values  of  character  and  effect,  the  other 
completeness  of  picture  and  drama,  that  the  confused 
whole  might  have  had  for  us — is  a  distinctly  differ- 
ent thing.  The  difference  consists,  you  see,  to  begin 
with,  in  the  very  breath  of  our  poet's  genius,  already, 
and  so  inordinately,  at  play  on  them  from  the  first 
of  our  knowing  them.  And  it  consists  in  the  second 
place  of  such  an  extracted  sense  of  the  whole,  which 
becomes,  after  the  most  extraordinary  fashion,  bigger 
by  the  extraction,  immeasurably  bigger  than  even  the 
most  cumulative  weight  of  the  mere  crude  evidence, 
that  our  choice  of  how  to  take  it  all  is  in  a  manner 
determined  for  us:  we  can  only  take  it  as  tremen- 
dously interesting,  interesting  not  only  in  itself  but 


"THE  RING  AND  THE  BOOK"        393 

with  the  great  added  interest,  the  dignity  and  au- 
thority and  beauty,  of  Browning's  general  perception 
of  it.  We  can't  not  accept  this,  and  little  enough  on 
the  whole  do  we  want  not  to:  it  sees  us,  with  its  tre- 
mendous push,  that  of  its  poetic,  esthetic,  historic, 
psychologic  shoulder  (one  scarce  knows  how  to  name 
it),  so  far  on  our  way.  Yet  all  the  while  we  are  in 
presence  not  at  all  of  an  achieved  form,  but  of  a  mere 
preparation  for  one,  though  on  the  hugest  scale;  so 
that,  you  see,  we  are  no  more  than  decently  atten- 
tive with  our  question:  "Which  of  them  all,  of  the 
various  methods  of  casting  the  wondrously  mixed 
metal,  is  he,  as  he  goes,  preparing?"  Well,  as  he 
keeps  giving  and  giving,  in  immeasurable  plenty,  it  is 
in  our  selection  from  it  all  and  our  picking  it  over  that 
we  seek,  and  to  whatever  various  and  unequal  effect 
find,  our  account.  He  works  over  his  vast  material, 
and  we  then  work  him  over,  though  not  availing  our- 
selves, to  this  end,  of  a  grain  he  himself  doesn't  some- 
how give  us;  and  there  we  are. 

I  admit  that  my  faith  in  my  particular  contention 
would  be  a  degree  firmer  and  fonder  if  there  didn't 
glimmer  through  our  poet's  splendid  hocus-pocus  just 
the  hint  of  one  of  those  flaws  that  sometimes  deform 
the  fair  face  of  a  subject  otherwise  generally  appeal- 
ing or  promising — of  such  a  subject  in  especial  as  may 
have  been  submitted  to  us,  possibly  even  with  the 
pretension  to  impose  it,  in  too  complete  a  shape.  The 
idea  but  half  hinted — when  it  is  a  very  good  one — 
is  apt  to  contain  the  germ  of  happier  fruit  than  the 
freight  of  the  whole  branch,  waved  at  us  or  dropped 
into  our  lap,  very  often  proves.  This  happens  when 
we  take  over,  as  the  phrase  is,  established  data,  take 


394  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

them  over  from  existing  records  and  under  some  in- 
volved obligation  to  take  them  as  they  stand.  That 
drawback  rests  heavily  for  instance  on  the  so-called 
historic  fiction — so  beautiful  a  case  it  is  of  a  muddle- 
ment  of  terms — and  is  just  one  of  the  eminent  reasons 
why  the  embarrassed  Muse  of  that  form,  pulled  up 
again  and  again,  and  the  more  often  the  fine  intelli- 
gence invokes  her,  by  the  need  of  a  superior  harmony 
which  shall  be  after  all  but  a  superior  truth,  catches 
up  her  flurried  skirts  and  makes  her  saving  dash  for 
some  gap  in  the  hedge  of  romance.  Now  the  flaw  on 
this  so  intensely  expressive  face,  that  of  the  general 
donnee  of  the  fate  of  Pompilia,  is  that  amid  the  va- 
riety of  forces  at  play  about  her  the  unity  of  the  sit- 
uation isn't,  by  one  of  those  large  straight  ideal  ges- 
tures on  the  part  of  the  Muse,  handed  to  us  at  a  stroke. 
The  question  of  the  whereabouts  of  the  unity  of  a 
group  of  data  subject  to  be  wrought  together  into  a 
thing  of  art,  the  question  in  other  words  of  the  point 
at  which  the  various  implications  of  interest,  no  mat- 
ter how  many,  most  converge  and  interfuse,  becomes 
always,  by  my  sense  of  the  affair,  quite  the  first  to  be 
answered;  for  according  to  the  answer  shapes  and  fills 
itself  the  very  vessel  of  that  beauty — the  beauty,  ex- 
actly, of  interest,  of  maximum  interest,  which  is  the 
ultimate  extract  of  any  collocation  of  facts,  any  pic- 
ture of  life,  and  the  finest  aspect  of  any  artistic  work. 
Call  a  novel  a  picture  of  life  as  much  as  we  will;  call 
it,  according  to  one  of  our  recent  fashions,  a  slice,  or 
even  a  chunk,  even  a  "bloody"  chunk,  of  life,  a  rough 
excision  from  that  substance  as  superficially  cut  and 
as  summarily  served  as  possible,  it  still  fails  to  escape 
this  exposure  to  appreciation,  or  in  other  words  to 
criticism,  that  it  has  had  to  be  selected,  selected  under 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        395 

some  sense  for  something;  and  the  unity  of  the  exhi- 
bition should  meet  us,  does  meet  us  if  the  work  be 
done,  at  the  point  at  which  that  sense  is  most  patent. 
If  the  slice  or  the  chunk,  or  whatever  we  call  it,  if  it 
isn't  "done,"  as  we  say — and  as  it  so  often  declines 
to  be — the  work  itself  of  course  isn't  likely  to  be;  and 
there  we  may  dismiss  it. 

The  first  thing  we  do  is  to  cast  about  for  some  cen- 
tre in  our  field;  seeing  that,  for  such  a  purpose  as 
ours,  the  subject  might  very  nearly  go  a-begging  with 
none  more  definite  than  the  author  has  provided  for 
it.  I  find  that  centre  in  the  embracing  consciousness 
of  Caponsacchi,  which,  coming  to  the  rescue  of  our 
question  of  treatment,  of  our  search  for  a  point  of 
control,  practically  saves  everything,  and  shows  itself 
moreover  the  only  thing  that  can  save.  The  more 
we  ask  of  any  other  part  of  our  picture  that  it  shall 
exercise  a  comprehensive  function,  the  more  we  see 
that  particular  part  inadequate;  as  inadequate  even 
in  the  extraordinarily  magnified  range  of  spirit  and 
reach  of  intelligence  of  the  atrocious  Franceschini  as 
in  the  sublime  passivity  and  plasticity  of  the  childish 
Pompilia,  educated  to  the  last  point  though  she  be 
indeed  by  suffering,  but  otherwise  so  untaught  that 
she  can  neither  read  nor  write.  The  magnified  state 
is  in  this  work  still  more  than  elsewhere  the  note  of 
the  intelligence,  of  any  and  every  faculty  of  thought,  im- 
puted by  our  poet  to  his  creatures;  and  it  takes  a  great 
mind,  one  of  the  greatest,  we  may  at  once  say,  to  make 
these  persons  express  and  confess  themselves  to  such 
an  effect  of  intellectual  splendour.  He  resorts  prima- 
rily to  their  sense,  their  sense  of  themselves  and  of 
everything  else  they  know,  to  exhibit  them,  and  has 


396  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

for  this  purpose  to  keep  them,  and  to  keep  them  per- 
sistently and  inexhaustibly,  under  the  fixed  lens  of  his 
prodigious  vision.  He  thus  makes  out  in  them  bound- 
less treasures  of  truth — truth  even  when  it  happens 
to  be,  as  in  the  case  of  Count  Guido,  but  a  shining 
wealth  of  constitutional  falsity.  Of  the  extent  to 
which  he  may  after  this  fashion  unlimitedly  draw  upon 
them  his  exposure  of  Count  Guido,  which  goes  on  and 
on,  though  partly,  I  admit,  by  repeating  itself,  is  a 
wondrous  example.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  of  Pom- 
pilia — Pompilia  pierced  with  twenty  wounds,  Pompilia 
on  her  death-bed,  Pompilia  but  seventeen  years  old 
and  but  a  fortnight  a  mother — that  she  acquires  an 
intellectual  splendour  just  by  the  fact  of  the  vast  cov- 
ering charity  of  imagination  with  which  her  recording, 
our  commemorated,  avenger,  never  so  as  in  this  case 
an  avenger  of  the  wronged  beautiful  things  of  life, 
hangs  over  and  breathes  upon  her.  We  see  her  come 
out  to  him,  and  the  extremely  remarkable  thing  is 
that  we  see  it,  on  the  whole,  without  doubting  that  it 
might  just  have  been.  Nothing  could  thus  be  more 
interesting,  however  it  may  at  moments  and  in  places 
puzzle  us,  than  the  impunity,  on  our  poet's  part,  of 
most  of  these  overstretchings  of  proportion,  these  vio- 
lations of  the  immediate  appearance.  Browning  is 
deep  down  below  the  immediate  with  the  first  step 
of  his  approach;  he  has  vaulted  over  the  gate,  is  al- 
ready far  afield  and  never,  so  long  as  we  watch  him, 
has  occasion  to  fall  back.  We  wonder,  for,  after  all, 
the  real  is  his  quest,  the  very  ideal  of  the  real,  the 
real  most  finely  mixed  with  life,  which  is  in  the  last 
analysis  the  ideal;  and  we  know,  with  our  dimmer 
vision,  no  such  reality  as  a  Franceschini  fighting  for 
his  life,  fighting  for  the  vindication  of  his  baseness, 
embodying  his  squalor,  with  an  audacity  of  wit,  an 


"THE   RING  AND  THE   BOOK"         397 

intensity  of  colour,  a  variety  of  speculation  and  illus- 
tration, that  represent  well-nigh  the  maximum  play 
of  the  human  mind.  It  is  in  like  sort  scarce  too  much 
to  say  of  the  exquisite  Pompilia  that  on  her  part  in- 
telligence and  expression  are  disengaged  to  a  point  at 
which  the  angels  may  well  begin  to  envy  her;  and  all 
again  without  our  once  wincing  so  far  as  our  consist- 
ently liking  to  see  and  hear  and  believe  is  concerned. 
Caponsacchi  regales  us,  of  course,  with  the  rarest  fruit 
of  a  great  character,  a  great  culture  and  a  great  case; 
but  Caponsacchi  is  acceptedly  and  naturally,  need- 
fully and  illustratively,  splendid.  He  is  the  soul  of 
man  at  its  finest — having  passed  through  the  smoky 
fires  of  life  and  emerging  clear  and  high.  Greatest  of 
all  the  spirits  exhibited,  however,  is  that  of  the  more 
than  octogenarian  Pope,  at  whose  brooding,  ponder- 
ing, solitary  vigil,  by  the  end  of  a  hard  grey  winter 
day  in  the  great  bleak  waiting  Vatican — "in  the  plain 
closet  where  he  does  such  work" — we  assist  as  inti- 
mately as  at  every  other  step  of  the  case,  and  on 
whose  grand  meditation  we  heavily  hang.  But  the 
Pope  strikes  us  at  first — though  indeed  perhaps  only 
at  first — as  too  high  above  the  whole  connection  func- 
tionally and  historically  for  us  to  place  him  within  it 
dramatically.  Our  novel  faces  provisionally  the  ques- 
tion of  dispensing  with  him,  as  it  dispenses  with  the 
amazing,  bristling,  all  too  indulgently  presented  Roman 
advocates  on  either  side  of  the  case,  who  combine  to 
put  together  the  most  formidable  monument  we  pos- 
sess to  Browning's  active  curiosity  and  the  liveliest 
proof  of  his  almost  unlimited  power  to  give  on  his 
readers'  nerves  without  giving  on  his  own. 

What  remains  with  us  all  this  time,  none  the  less, 
is  the  effect  of  magnification,  the  exposure  of  each  of 


398  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

these  figures,  in  its  degree,  to  that  iridescent  wash  of 
personality,  of  temper  and  faculty,  that  our  author 
ladles  out  to  them,  as  the  copious  share  of  each,  from 
his  own  great  reservoir  of  spiritual  health,  and  which 
makes  us,  as  I  have  noted,  seek  the  reason  of  a  per- 
petual anomaly.  Why,  bristling  so  with  references  to 
him  rather  than  with  references  to  each  other  or  to 
any  accompanying  set  of  circumstances,  do  they  still 
establish  more  truth  and  beauty  than  they  sacrifice, 
do  they  still,  according  to  their  chance,  help  to  make 
"The  Ring  and  the  Book"  a  great  living  thing,  a 
great  objective  mass  ?  I  brushed  by  the  answer  a  mo- 
ment ago,  I  think,  in  speaking  of  the  development  in 
Pompilia  of  the  resource  of  expression,  which  brings 
us  round,  it  seems  to  me,  to  the  justification  of  Brown- 
ing's method.  To  express  his  inner  self — his  outward 
was  a  different  affair ! — and  to  express  it  utterly,  even 
if  no  matter  how,  was  clearly,  for  his  own  measure 
and  consciousness  of  that  inner  self,  to  be  poetic;  and 
the  solution  of  all  the  deviations  and  disparities  or, 
speaking  critically,  monstrosities,  in  the  mingled  tissue 
of  this  work,  is  the  fact  that  whether  or  no  by  such 
convulsions  of  soul  and  sense  life  got  delivered  for 
him,  the  garment  of  life  (which  for  him  was  poetry 
and  poetry  alone)  got  disposed  in  its  due  and  ade- 
quate multitudinous  folds.  We  move  with  him  but 
in  images  and  references  and  vast  and  far  correspond- 
ences; we  eat  but  of  strange  compounds  and  drink  but 
of  rare  distillations;  and  very  soon,  after  a  course  of 
this,  we  feel  ourselves,  however  much  or  however  little 
to  our  advantage  we  may  on  occasion  pronounce  it, 
in  the  world  of  Expression  at  any  cost.  That,  essen- 
tially, is  the  world  of  poetry — which  in  the  cases  known 
to  our  experience  where  it  seems  to  us  to  differ  from 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        399 

Browning's  world  does  so  but  through  this  latter's 
having  been,  by  the  vigour  and  violence,  the  bold 
familiarity,  of  his  grasp  and  pull  at  it,  moved  several 
degrees  nearer  us,  so  to  speak,  than  any  other  of  the 
same  general  sort  with  which  we  are  acquainted;  so 
that,  intellectually,  we  back  away  from  it  a  little,  back 
down  before  it,  again  and  again,  as  we  try  to  get  off 
from  a  picture  or  a  group  or  a  view  which  is  too  much 
upon  us  and  thereby  out  of  focus.  Browning  is  "  upon  " 
us,  straighter  upon  us  always,  somehow,  than  anyone 
else  of  his  race;  and  we  thus  recoil,  we  push  our  chair 
back,  from  the  table  he  so  tremendously  spreads,  just 
to  see  a  little  better  what  is  on  it.  This  makes  a 
relation  with  him  that  it  is  difficult  to  express;  as  if 
he  came  up  against  us,  each  time,  on  the  same  side 
of  the  street  and  not  on  the  other  side,  across  the 
way,  where  we  mostly  see  the  poets  elegantly  walk, 
and  where  we  greet  them  without  danger  of  concussion. 
It  is  on  this  same  side,  as  I  call  it,  on  our  side,  on 
the  other  hand,  that  I  rather  see  our  encounter  with 
the  novelists  taking  place;  we  being,  as  it  were,  more 
mixed  with  them,  or  they  at  least,  by  their  desire  and 
necessity,  more  mixed  with  us,  and  our  brush  of  them, 
in  their  minor  frenzy,  a  comparatively  muffled  en- 
counter. 

We  have  in  the  whole  thing,  at  any  rate,  the  ele- 
ment of  action  which  is  at  the  same  time  constant  pic- 
ture, and  the  element  of  picture  which  is  at  the  same 
time  constant  action;  and  with  a  fusion,  as  the  mass 
moves,  that  is  none  the  less  effective,  none  the  less 
thick  and  complete,  from  our  not  owing  it  in  the 
least  to  an  artful  economy.  Another  force  pushes  its 
way  through  the  waste  and  rules  the  scene,  making 


400  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

wrong  things  right  and  right  things  a  hundred  times 
more  so — that  breath  of  Browning's  own  particular 
matchless  Italy  which  takes  us  full  in  the  face  and 
remains  from  the  first  the  felt  rich  coloured  air  in 
which  we  live.  The  quantity  of  that  atmosphere  that 
he  had  to  give  out  is  like  nothing  else  in  English  poetry, 
any  more  than  in  English  prose,  that  I  recall;  and 
since  I  am  taking  these  liberties  with  him,  let  me 
take  one  too,  a  little,  with  the  fruit  of  another  genius 
shining  at  us  here  in  association — with  that  great 
placed  and  timed  prose  fiction  which  we  owe  to  George 
Eliot  and  in  which  her  projection  of  the  stage  and 
scenery  is  so  different  a  matter.  Curious  enough  this 
difference  where  so  many  things  make  for  identity — 
the  quantity  of  talent,  the  quantity  of  knowledge,  the 
high  equality  (or  almost)  of  culture  and  curiosity,  not 
to  say  of  "spiritual  life."  Each  writer  drags  along  a 
far-sweeping  train,  though  indeed  Browning's  spreads 
so  considerably  furthest;  but  his  stirs  up,  to  my  vision, 
a  perfect  cloud  of  gold-dust,  while  hers,  in  "  Romola," 
by  contrast,  leaves  the  air  about  as  clear,  about  as 
white,  and  withal  about  as  cold,  as  before  she  had 
benevolently  entered  it.  This  straight  saturation  of 
our  author's,  this  prime  assimilation  of  the  elements  for 
which  the  name  of  Italy  stands,  is  a  single  splendid 
case,  however;  I  can  think  of  no  second  one  that  is 
not  below  it — if  we  take  it  as  supremely  expressed  in 
those  of  his  lyrics  and  shorter  dramatic  monologues 
that  it  has  most  helped  to  inspire.  The  Rome  and 
Tuscany  of  the  early  'fifties  had  become  for  him  so 
at  once  a  medium,  a  bath  of  the  senses  and  percep- 
tions, into  which  he  could  sink,  in  which  he  could 
unlimitedly  soak,  that  wherever  he  might  be  touched 
afterwards  he  gave  out  some  effect  of  that  immersion. 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        401 

This  places  him  to  my  mind  quite  apart,  makes  the 
rest  of  our  poetic  record  of  a  similar  experience  com- 
paratively pale  and  abstract.  Shelley  and  Swinburne 
—to  name  only  his  compeers — are,  I  know,  a  part  of 
the  record;  but  the  author  of  "Men  and  Women," 
of  "Pippa  Passes,"  of  certain  of  the  Dramatic  Lyrics 
and  other  scattered  felicities,  not  only  expresses  and 
reflects  the  matter;  he  fairly,  he  heatedly,  if  I  may 
use  such  a  term,  exudes  and  perspires  it.  Shelley,  let 
us  say  in  the  connection,  is  a  light  and  Swinburne,  let 
us  say,  a  sound;  Browning  alone  of  them  all  is  a  tem- 
perature. We  feel  it,  we  are  in  it  at  a  plunge,  with 
the  very  first  pages  of  the  thing  before  us;  to  which, 
I  confess,  we  surrender  with  a  momentum  drawn  from 
fifty  of  their  predecessors,  pages  not  less  sovereign, 
elsewhere. 

The  old  Florence  of  the  late  spring  closes  round  us; 
the  hand  of  Italy  is  at  once,  with  the  recital  of  the 
old-world  litter  of  Piazza  San  Lorenzo,  with  that  of 
the  great  glare  and  of  the  great  shadow-masses,  heavy 
upon  us,  heavy  with  that  strange  weight,  that  mixed 
pressure,  which  is  somehow,  to  the  imagination,  at 
once  a  caress  and  a  menace.  Our  poet  kicks  up  on  the 
spot  and  at  short  notice  what  I  have  called  his  cloud 
of  gold-dust.  I  can  but  speak  for  myself  at  least- 
something  that  I  want  to  feel  both  as  historic  and 
esthetic  truth,  both  as  pictorial  and  moral  interest, 
something  that  will  repay  my  fancy  tenfold  if  I  can 
but  feel  it,  hovers  before  me,  and  I  say  to  myself  that, 
whether  or  no  a  great  poem  is  to  come  ofF,  I  will  be 
hanged  if  one  of  the  vividest  of  all  stories  and  one  of 
the  sharpest  of  all  impressions  doesn't.  I  beckon  these 
things  on,  I  follow  them  up,  I  so  desire  and  need  them 


402  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

that  I  of  course,  by  my  imaginative  collaboration, 
contribute  to  them — from  the  moment,  that  is,  of  my 
finding  myself  really  in  relation  to  the  great  points. 
On  the  other  hand,  as  certainly,  it  has  taken  the  au- 
thor of  the  first  volume,  and  of  the  two  admirable 
chapters  of  the  same — since  I  can't  call  them  cantos- 
entitled  respectively  "Half-Rome"  and  "The  Other 
Half-Rome,"  to  put  me  in  relation;  where  it  is  that 
he  keeps  me  more  and  more,  letting  the  closeness  of 
my  state,  it  must  be  owned,  occasionally  drop,  letting 
the  finer  call  on  me  even,  for  bad  quarters-of-an-hour, 
considerably  languish,  but  starting  up  before  me  again 
in  vivid  authority  if  I  really  presume  to  droop  or 
stray.  He  takes  his  wilful  way  with  me,  but  I  make 
it  my  own,  picking  over  and  over  as  I  have  said,  like 
some  lingering  talking  pedlar's  client,  his  great  un- 
loosed pack;  and  thus  it  is  that  by  the  time  I  am 
settled  with  Pompilia  at  Arezzo  I  have  lived  into  all 
the  conditions.  They  press  upon  me  close,  those  won- 
derful dreadful  beautiful  particulars  of  the  Italy  of  the 
eve  of  the  eighteenth  century — Browning  himself  mov- 
ing about,  darting  hither  and  thither  in  them,  at  his 
mighty  ease:  beautiful,  I  say,  because  of  the  quan- 
tity of  romantic  and  esthetic  tradition  from  a  more 
romantic  and  esthetic  age  still  visibly,  palpably,  in 
solution  there;  and  wonderful  and  dreadful  through 
something  of  a  similar  tissue  of  matchless  and  ruth- 
less consistencies  and  immoralities.  I  make  to  my 
hand,  as  this  infatuated  reader,  my  Italy  of  the  eve 
of  the  eighteenth  century — a  vast  painted  and  gilded 
rococo  shell  roofing  over  a  scenic,  an  amazingly  fig- 
ured and  furnished  earth,  but  shutting  out  almost  the 
whole  of  our  own  dearly-bought,  rudely-recovered  spir- 
itual sky.  You  see  I  have  this  right,  all  the  while, 


"THE   RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        403 

if  I  recognise  my  suggested  material,  which  keeps 
coming  and  coming  in  the  measure  of  my  need,  and 
my  duty  to  which  is  to  recognise  it,  and  as  hand- 
somely and  actively  as  possible.  The  great  thing  is 
that  I  have  such  a  group  of  figures  moving  across  so 
constituted  a  scene — figures  so  typical,  so  salient,  so 
reeking  with  the  old-world  character,  so  impressed  all 
over  with  its  manners  and  its  morals,  and  so  predes- 
tined, we  see,  to  this  particular  horrid  little  drama. 
And  let  me  not  be  charged  with  giving  it  away,  the 
idea  of  the  latent  prose  fiction,  by  calling  it  little 
and  horrid;  let  me  not — for  with  my  contention  I 
can't  possibly  afford  to — appear  to  agree  with  those 
who  speak  of  the  Franceschini-Comparini  case  as  a 
mere  vulgar  criminal  anecdote. 

It  might  have  been  such  but  for  two  reasons- 
counting  only  the  principal  ones;  one  of  these  our 
fact  that  we  see  it  so,  I  repeat,  in  Browning's  inor- 
dinately-coloured light,  and  the  other — which  is  in- 
deed perhaps  but  another  face  of  the  same — that, 
with  whatever  limitations,  it  gives  us  in  the  rarest 
manner  three  characters  of  the  first  importance.  I 
hold  three  a  great  many;  I  could  have  done  with  it 
almost,  I  think,  if  there  had  been  but  one  or  two; 
our  rich  provision  shows  you  at  any  rate  what  I  mean 
by  speaking  of  our  author's  performance  as  above  all 
a  preparation  for  something.  Deeply  he  felt  that  with 
the  three — the  three  built  up  at  us  each  with  an  equal 
genial  rage  of  reiterative  touches — there  couldn't  even- 
tually not  be  something  done  (artistically  done,  I 
mean)  if  someone  would  only  do  it.  There  they  are 
in  their  old  yellow  Arezzo,  that  miniature  milder 
Florence,  as  sleepy  to  my  recollection  as  a  little  En- 


404  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

glish  cathedral  city  clustered  about  a  Close,  but  dream- 
ing not  so  peacefully  nor  so  innocently;  there  is  the 
great  fretted  fabric  of  the  Church  on  which  they  are 
all  swarming  and  grovelling,  yet  after  their  fashion 
interesting  parasites,  from  the  high  and  dry  old  Arch- 
bishop, meanly  wise  or  ignobly  edifying,  to  whom 
Pompilia  resorts  in  her  woe  and  who  practically  pushes 
her  away  with  a  shuffling  velvet  foot;  down  through 
the  couple  of  Franceschini  cadets,  Canon  Girolamo 
and  Abate  Paul,  mere  minions,  fairly  in  the  vermin- 
ous degree,  of  the  overgrown  order  or  too-rank  organ- 
ism; down  to  Count  Guido  himself  and  to  Canon 
Caponsacchi,  who  have  taken  the  tonsure  at  the 
outset  of  their  careers,  but  none  too  strictly  the  vows, 
and  who  lead  their  lives  under  some  strangest  pro- 
fanest  pervertedest  clerical  category.  There  have  been 
before  this  the  Roman  preliminaries,  the  career  of  the 
queer  Comparini,  the  adoption,  the  assumption  of  the 
parentship,  of  the  ill-starred  little  girl,  with  the  sor- 
did cynicism  of  her  marriage  out  of  hand,  conveying 
her  presumptive  little  fortune,  her  poor  handful  of 
even  less  than  contingent  cash,  to  hungry  middle- 
aged  Count  Guide's  stale  "rank";  the  many-toned 
note  or  turbid  harmony  of  all  of  which  recurs  to  us 
in  the  vivid  image  of  the  pieties  and  paganisms  of 
San  Lorenzo  in  Lucina,  that  banal  little  church  in  the 
old  upper  Corso — banal,  that  is,  at  the  worst,  with 
the  rare  Roman  banalite;  bravely  banal,  or  banal 
with  style — that  we  have  all  passed  with  a  sense  of 
its  reprieve  to  our  sight-seeing,  and  where  the  bleed- 
ing bodies  of  the  still-breathing  Pompilia  and  her  ex- 
tinct companions  are  laid  out  on  the  greasy  marble 
of  the  altar-steps.  To  glance  at  these  things,  how- 
ever, is  fairly  to  be  tangled,  and  at  once,  in  the  au- 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        405 

thor's  complexity  of  suggestion,  to  which  our  own 
thick-coming  fancies  respond  in  no  less  a  measure; 
so  that  I  have  already  missed  my  time  to  so  much 
even  as  name  properly  the  tremendous  little  chapter 
we  should  have  devoted  to  the  Franceschini  interior 
as  revealed  at  last  to  Comparini  eyes;  the  sinister 
scene  or  ragged  ruin  of  the  Aretine  "palace,"  where 
pride  and  penury  and,  at  once,  rabid  resentment  show 
their  teeth  in  the  dark  and  the  void,  and  where  Pom- 
pilia's  inspired  little  character,  clear  silver  hardened, 
effectually  beaten  and  battered,  to  steel,  begins  to 
shine  at  the  blackness  with  a  light  that  fairly  outfaces 
at  last  the  gleam  of  wolfish  fangs — the  character  that 
draws  from  Guido,  in  his,  alas,  too  boundless  harangue 
of  the  fourth  volume,  some  of  the  sharpest  specifica- 
tions into  which  that  extraordinary  desert,  that  inde- 
scribable waste  of  intellectual  life,  as  I  have  hinted 
at  its  being,  from  time  to  time  flowers. 

"None  of  your  abnegation  of  revenge  ! 
Fly  at  me  frank,  tug  where  I  tear  again ! 
Away  with  the  empty  stare !     Be  holy  still, 
And  stupid  ever  !     Occupy  your  patch 
Of  private  snow  that's  somewhere  in  what  world 
May  now  be  growing  icy  round  your  head, 
And  aguish  at  your  foot-print — freeze  not  me!" 

I  have  spoken  of  the  enveloping  consciousness — or 
call  it  just  the  struggling,  emerging,  comparing,  at  last 
intensely  living  conscience — of  Caponsacchi  as  the  in- 
dicated centre  of  our  situation  or  determinant  of  our 
form,  in  the  matter  of  the  excellent  novel;  and  know 
of  course  what  such  an  indication  lets  me  in  for,  re- 
sponsibly speaking,  in  the  way  of  a  rearrangement  of 
relations,  in  the  way  of  liberties  taken.  To  lift  our 


4o6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

subject  out  of  the  sphere  of  anecdote  and  place  it  in 
the  sphere  of  drama,  liberally  considered,  to  give  it 
dignity  by  extracting  its  finest  importance,  causing  its 
parts  to  flower  together  into  some  splendid  special 
sense,  we  supply  it  with  a  large  lucid  reflector,  which 
we  find  only,  as  I  have  already  noted,  in  that  mind 
and  soul  concerned  in  the  business  that  have  at  once 
the  highest  sensibility  and  the  highest  capacity,  or 
that  are,  as  we  may  call  it,  most  admirably  agitated. 
There  is  the  awkward  fact,  the  objector  may  say,  that 
by  our  record  the  mind  and  soul  in  question  are  not 
concerned  till  a  given  hour,  when  many  things  have 
already  happened  and  the  climax  is  almost  in  sight; 
to  which  we  reply,  at  our  ease,  that  we  simply  don't 
suffer  that  fact  to  be  awkward.  From  the  moment 
I  am  taking  liberties  I  suffer  no  awkwardness;  I  should 
be  very  helpless,  quite  without  resource  and  without 
vision,  if  I  did.  I  said  it  to  begin  with:  Browning 
works  the  whole  thing  over — the  whole  thing  as  orig- 
inally given  him — and  we  work  him;  helpfully,  art- 
fully, boldly,  which  is  our  whole  blest  basis.  We 
therefore  turn  Caponsacchi  on  earlier,  ever  so  much 
earlier;  turn  him  on,  with  a  brave  ingenuity,  from 
the  very  first — that  is  in  Rome  if  need  be;  place  him 
there  in  the  field,  at  once  recipient  and  agent,  vaguely 
conscious  and  with  splendid  brooding  apprehension, 
awaiting  the  adventure  of  his  life,  awaiting  his  call, 
his  real  call  (the  others  have  been  such  vain  shows 
and  hollow  stopgaps),  awaiting,  in  fine,  his  terrible 
great  fortune.  His  direct  connection  with  Pompilia 
begins  certainly  at  Arezzo,  only  after  she  has  been 
some  time  hideously  mismated  and  has  suffered  all 
but  her  direst  extremity — that  is  of  the  essence;  we 
take  it;  it's  all  right.  But  his  indirect  participation 


"THE  RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        407 

is  another  affair,  and  we  get  it — at  a  magnificent  stroke 
— by  the  fact  that  his  view  of  Franceschini,  his  fellow- 
Aretine  sordidly  "on  the  make,"  his  measure  of  un- 
desired,  indeed  of  quite  execrated  contact  with  him, 
brushed  against  in  the  motley  hungry  Roman  traffic, 
where  and  while  that  sinister  soul  snuffs  about  on  the 
very  vague  or  the  very  foul  scent  of  his  fortune,  may 
begin  whenever  we  like.  We  have  only  to  have  it 
begin  right,  only  to  make  it,  on  the  part  of  two  men, 
a  relation  of  strong  irritated  perception  and  restless 
righteous  convinced  instinct  in  the  one  nature  and  of 
equally  instinctive  hate  and  envy,  jealousy  and  latent 
fear,  on  the  other,  to  see  the  indirect  connection,  the 
one  with  Pompilia,  as  I  say,  throw  across  our  page 
as  portentous  a  shadow  as  we  need.  Then  we  get 
Caponsacchi  as  a  recipient  up  to  the  brim — as  an 
agent,  a  predestined  one,  up  to  the  hilt.  I  can  scarce 
begin  to  tell  you  what  I  see  him  give,  as  we  say,  or 
how  his  sentient  and  observational  life,  his  fine  re- 
actions in  presence  of  such  a  creature  as  Guido,  such 
a  social  type  and  image  and  lurid  light,  as  it  were, 
make  him  comparatively  a  modern  man,  breathed 
upon,  to  that  deep  and  interesting  agitation  I  have 
mentioned,  by  more  forces  than  he  yet  reckons  or 
knows  the  names  of. 

The  direct  relation — always  to  Pompilia — is  made, 
at  Arezzo,  as  we  know,  by  Franceschini  himself;  pre- 
paring his  own  doom,  in  the  false  light  of  his  debased 
wit,  by  creating  an  appearance  of  hidden  dealing  be- 
tween his  wife  and  the  priest  which  shall,  as  promptly 
as  he  likes — if  he  but  work  it  right — compromise  and 
overwhelm  them.  The  particular  deepest  damnation 
he  conceives  for  his  weaker,  his  weakest  victim  is  that 


408  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

she  shall  take  the  cleric  Caponsacchi  for  her  lover, 
he  indubitably  willing — to  Guido's  apprehension;  and 
that  her  castigation  at  his  hands  for  this,  sufficiently 
proved  upon  her,  shall  be  the  last  luxury  of  his  own 
baseness.  He  forges  infernally,  though  grossly  enough, 
an  imputed  correspondence  between  them,  a  series  of 
love-letters,  scandalous  scrawls,  of  the  last  erotic  in- 
tensity; which  we  in  the  event  see  solemnly  weighed 
by  his  fatuous  judges,  all  fatuous  save  the  grave  old 
Pope,  in  the  scale  of  Pompilia's  guilt  and  responsibil- 
ity. It  is  this  atrocity  that  at  the  denouement  damns 
Guido  himself  most,  or  well-nigh;  but  if  it  fails  and 
recoils,  as  all  his  calculations  do — it  is  only  his  rush 
of  passion  that  doesn't  miss — this  is  by  the  fact  ex- 
actly that,  as  we  have  seen,  his  wife  and  her  friend 
are,  for  our  perfect  persuasion,  characters  of  the  deep- 
est dye.  There,  if  you  please,  is  the  finest  side  of  our 
subject;  such  sides  come  up,  such  sides  flare  out  upon 
us,  when  we  get  such  characters  in  such  embroilments. 
Admire  with  me  therefore  our  felicity  in  this  first- 
class  value  of  Browning's  beautiful  critical  genial  vi- 
sion of  his  Caponsacchi — vision  of  him  as  the  tried 
and  tempered  and  illuminated  man,  a  great  round 
smooth,  though  as  yet  but  little  worn  gold-piece,  an 
embossed  and  figured  ducat  or  sequin  of  the  period, 
placed  by  the  poet  in  my  hand.  He  gives  me  that 
value  to  spend  for  him,  spend  on  all  the  strange  old 
experience,  old  sights  and  sounds  and  stuffs,  of  the 
old  stored  Italy — so  we  have  at  least  the  wit  to  spend 
it  to  high  advantage;  which  is  just  what  I  mean  by 
our  taking  the  liberties  we  spoke  of.  I  see  such  bits 
we  can  get  with  it;  but  the  difficulty  is  that  I  see  so 
many  more  things  than  I  can  have  even  dreamed  of 
giving  you  a  hint  of.  I  see  the  Arezzo  life  and  the 


"THE  RING  AND  THE  BOOK"        409 

Arezzo  crisis  with  every  "i"  dotted  and  every  cir- 
cumstance presented;  and  when  Guido  takes  his  wife, 
as  a  possible  trap  for  her,  to  the  theatre — the  theatre 
of  old  Arezzo:  share  with  me  the  tattered  vision  and 
inhale  the  musty  air ! — I  am  well  in  range  of  Pompilia, 
the  tragically  exquisite,  in  her  box,  with  her  husband 
not  there  for  the  hour  but  posted  elsewhere;  I  look 
at  her  in  fact  over  Caponsacchi's  shoulder  and  that 
of  his  brother-canon  Conti,  while  this  light  character, 
a  vivid  recruit  to  our  company,  manages  to  toss  into 
her  lap,  and  as  coming  in  guise  of  overture  from  his 
smitten  friend,  "a  papertwist  of  comfits."  There  is  a 
particular  famous  occasion  at  the  theatre  in  a  work 
of  more  or  less  contemporary  fiction — at  a  petty  pro- 
vincial theatre  which  isn't  even,  as  you  might  think, 
the  place  where  Pendennis  had  his  first  glimpse  of 
Miss  Fotheringay.  The  evening  at  the  Rouen  play- 
house of  Flaubert's  "Madame  Bovary"  has  a  relief 
not  elsewhere  equalled — it  is  the  most  done  visit  to 
the  play  in  all  literature — but,  though  " doing"  is  now 
so  woefully  out  of  favour,  my  idea  would  be  to  give 
it  here  a  precious  pendant;  which  connection,  silly 
Canon  Conti,  the  old  fripperies  and  levities,  the  whole 
queer  picture  and  show  of  manners,  is  handed  over  to 
us,  expressly,  as  inapt  for  poetic  illustration. 

What  is  equally  apt  for  poetic  or  for  the  other,  in- 
deed, is  the  thing  for  which  we  feel  "The  Ring  and 
the  Book"  preponderantly  done — it  is  at  least  what 
comes  out  clearest,  comes  out  as  straightest  and  strong- 
est and  finest,  from  Browning's  genius — the  exhibition 
of  the  great  constringent  relation  between  man  and 
woman  at  once  at  its  maximum  and  as  the  relation 
most  worth  while  in  life  for  either  party;  an  exhibi- 


410  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

tion  forming  quite  the  main  substance  of  our  author's 
message.  He  has  dealt,  in  his  immense  variety  and 
vivacity,  with  other  relations,  but  on  this  he  has 
thrown  his  most  living  weight;  it  remains  the  thing 
of  which  his  own  rich  experience  most  convincingly 
spoke  to  him.  He  has  testified  to  it  as  charged  to 
the  brim  with  the  burden  of  the  senses,  and  has  testi- 
fied to  it  as  almost  too  clarified,  too  liberated  and  sub- 
limated, for  traceable  application  or  fair  record;  he 
has  figured  it  as  never  too  much  either  of  the  flesh  or 
of  the  spirit  for  him,  so  long  as  the  possibility  of  both 
of  these  is  in  each,  but  always  and  ever  as  the  thing 
absolutely  most  worth  while.  It  is  in  the  highest  and 
rarest  degree  clarified  and  disengaged  for  Caponsac- 
chi  and  Pompilia;  but  what  their  history  most  con- 
cludes to  is  how  ineffably  it  was,  whatever  happened, 
worth  while.  Worth  while  most  then  for  them  or  for 
us  is  the  question  ?  Well,  let  us  say  worth  while  as- 
suredly for  us,  in  this  noble  exercise  of  our  imagina- 
tion. Which  accordingly  shows  us  what  we,  for  all 
our  prose  basis,  would  have  found,  to  repeat  my  term 
once  more,  prepared  for  us.  There  isn't  a  detail  of 
their  panting  flight  to  Rome  over  the  autumn  Apen- 
nines— the  long  hours  when  they  melt  together  only 
not  to  meet — that  doesn't  positively  plead  for  our  per- 
fect prose  transcript.  And  if  it  be  said  that  the  mere 
massacre  at  the  final  end  is  a  lapse  to  passivity  from 
the  high  plane,  for  our  pair  of  protagonists,  of  con- 
structive, of  heroic  vision,  this  is  not  a  blur  from  the 
time  everything  that  happens  happens  most  effectively 
to  Caponsacchi's  life.  Pompilia's  is  taken,  but  she  is 
none  the  less  given;  and  it  is  in  his  consciousness  and 
experience  that  she  most  intensely  flowers — with  all 
her  jubilation  for  doing  so.  So  that  he  contains  the 


"THE   RING  AND  THE   BOOK"        411 

whole — unless  indeed  after  all  the  Pope  does,  the 
Pope  whom  I  was  leaving  out  as  too  transcendent  for 
our  version.  Unless,  unless,  further  and  further,  I  see 
what  I  have  at  this  late  moment  no  right  to;  see,  as 
the  very  end  and  splendid  climax  of  all,  Caponsacchi 
sent  for  to  the  Vatican  and  admitted  alone  to  the 
Papal  presence.  There  is  a  scene  if  we  will;  and  in 
the  mere  mutual  confrontation,  brief,  silent,  searching, 
recognising,  consecrating,  almost  as  august  on  the  one 
part  as  on  the  other.  It  rounds  us  off;  but  you  will 
think  I  stray  too  far.  I  have  wanted,  alas,  to  say 
such  still  other  fond  fine  things — it  being  of  our  poet's 
great  nature  to  prompt  them  at  every  step — that  I 
almost  feel  I  have  missed  half  my  points;  which  will 
doubtless  therefore  show  you  these  remarks  in  their 
nakedness.  Take  them  and  my  particular  contention 
as  a  pretext  and  a  minor  affair  if  you  will  only  feel 
them  at  the  same  time  as  at  the  worst  a  restless  re- 
finement of  homage.  It  has  been  easy  in  many  an- 
other case  to  run  to  earth  the  stray  prime  fancy,  the 
original  anecdote  or  artless  tale,  from  which  a  great 
imaginative  work,  starting  off  after  meeting  it,  has 
sprung  and  rebounded  again  and  soared;  and  per- 
haps it  is  right  and  happy  and  final  that  one  should 
have  faltered  in  attempting  by  a  converse  curiosity 
to  clip  off  or  tie  back  the  wings  that  once  have  spread. 
You  will  agree  with  me  none  the  less,  I  feel,  that 
Browning's  great  generous  wings  are  over  us  still  and 
even  now,  more  than  ever  now;  and  also  that  they 
shake  down  on  us  his  blessing. 


AN  AMERICAN  ART-SCHOLAR:  CHARLES 
ELIOT  NORTON 

1908 

I  GLADLY  embrace  the  occasion  to  devote  a  few  words 
to  the  honoured  memory  of  my  distinguished  friend 
the  late  Charles  Eliot  Norton,  who,  dying  at  Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts,  on  the  2ist  of  October  last, 
after  having  reached  his  eightieth  year,  had  long  occu- 
pied— and  with  an  originality  of  spirit  and  a  benefi- 
cence of  effect  all  his  own — the  chair  of  the  History 
of  the  Fine  Arts  at  Harvard  University,  as  well  as,  in 
the  view  of  the  American  world  surrounding  that  seat 
of  influence,  the  position  of  one  of  the  most  accom- 
plished of  scholars  and  most  efficient  of  citizens.  This 
commemorative  page  may  not  disclaim  the  personal 
tone,  for  I  can  speak  of  Charles  Norton  but  in  the 
light  of  an  affection  which  began  long  years  ago,  even 
though  my  part  in  our  relation  had  to  be,  for  some 
time,  markedly  that  of  a  junior;  of  which  tie  I  was 
to  remain  ever  after,  despite  long  stretches  of  material 
separation,  a  conscious  and  grateful  beneficiary.  I 
can  speak  of  him  therefore  as  I  happened  myself  to 
see  and  know  him — with  interest  and  sympathy  acting, 
for  considerable  periods  together,  across  distances  and 
superficial  differences,  yet  with  the  sense  of  his  ex- 
tremely individual  character  and  career  suffering  no 
abatement,  and  indeed  with  my  impression  of  the  fine 
consistency  and  exemplary  value  of  these  things  clear 
as  never  before. 

412 


CHARLES  ELIOT  NORTON  413 

I  find  this  impression  go  back  for  its  origin  very 
far — to  one  autumn  day  when,  an  extremely  imma- 
ture aspirant  to  the  rare  laurel  of  the  critic,  I  went 
out  from  Boston  to  Cambridge  to  offer  him  a  contri- 
bution to  the  old,  if  I  should  not  rather  say  the  then 
middle-aged,  "North  American  Review,"  of  which  he 
had  recently  undertaken  the  editorship.  I  already 
knew  him  a  little,  enough  to  have  met  casual  kindness 
at  his  hands;  but  my  vision  of  his  active  presence 
and  function,  in  the  community  that  had  happily  pro- 
duced and  that  was  long  to  enjoy  him,  found  itself,  I 
think,  completely  constituted  at  that  hour,  with  scarce 
an  essential  touch  to  be  afterwards  added.  He  largely 
developed  and  expanded  as  time  went  on;  certain 
more  or  less  local  reserves  and  conservatisms  fell  away 
from  him;  but  his  temper  and  attitude,  all  his  own 
from  the  first,  were  to  give  a  singular  unity  to  his 
life.  This  intensity  of  perception  on  his  young  vis- 
itor's part  may  perhaps  have  sprung  a  little  from  the 
fact  that  he  accepted  on  the  spot,  as  the  visitor  still 
romantically  remembers,  a  certain  very  first  awkward 
essay  in  criticism,  and  was  to  publish  it  in  his  forth- 
coming number;  but  I  little  doubt  whether  even  had 
he  refused  it  the  grace  of  the  whole  occasion  would 
have  lost  anything  to  my  excited  view,  and  feel  sure 
that  the  interest  in  particular  would  have  gained  had 
he  charmingly  put  before  me  (as  he  would  have  been 
sure  to  do)  the  ground  of  his  discrimination.  For  his 
eminent  character  as  a  "representative  of  culture" 
announced  itself  exactly  in  proportion  as  one's  gen- 
eral sense  of  the  medium  in  which  it  was  to  be  ex- 
erted was  strong;  and  I  seem  verily  to  recall  that 
even  in  the  comparative  tenderness  of  that  season  I 
had  grasped  the  idea  of  the  precious,  the  quite  far- 


4i4  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

reaching  part  such  an  exemplar  might  play.  Charles 
Norton's  distinction  and  value — this  was  still  some 
years  before  his  professorate  had  taken  form — showed 
early  and  above  all  the  note  and  the  advantage  that 
they  were  to  be  virtues  of  American  application,  and 
were  to  draw  their  life  from  the  signal  American  op- 
portunity; to  that  degree  that  the  detailed  record 
of  his  influence  would  be  really  one  of  the  most  inter- 
esting of  American  social  documents,  and  that  his 
good  work  is  best  lighted  by  a  due  acquaintance  with 
the  conditions  of  the  life  about  him,  indispensable  for 
a  founded  recognition  of  it.  It  is  not  too  much  to 
say  that  the  representative  of  culture — always  in  the 
high  and  special  sense  in  which  he  practised  that  faith 
— had  before  him  in  the  United  States  of  those  days 
a  great  and  arduous  mission,  requiring  plentiful  cour- 
age as  well  as  plentiful  knowledge,  endless  good  hu- 
mour as  well  as  assured  taste. 

What  comes  back  to  me  then  from  the  early  day  I 
have  glanced  at  is  exactly  that  prompt  sense  of  the 
clustered  evidence  of  my  friend's  perfect  adaptation 
to  the  civilising  mission,  and  not  least  to  the  need- 
fully dauntless  and  unperturbed  side  of  it.  His  so 
pleasant  old  hereditary  home,  with  its  ample  acres  and 
numerous  spoils — at  a  time  when  acres  merely  mar- 
ginal and,  so  to  speak,  atmospheric,  as  well  as  spoils 
at  all  felicitously  gathered,  were  rare  in  the  United 
States — seemed  to  minister  to  the  general  assurance, 
constituting  as  they  did  such  a  picture  of  life  as  one 
vaguely  supposed  recognisable,  right  and  left,  in  an 
old  society,  or,  otherwise  expressed,  in  that  "Europe" 
which  was  always,  roundabout  one,  the  fond  alterna- 
tive of  the  cultivated  imagination,  but  of  which  the 


CHARLES  ELIOT  NORTON  415 

possible  American  copy  ever  seemed  far  to  seek.  To 
put  it  in  a  nutshell,  the  pilgrimage  to  the  Shady  Hill 
of  those  years  had,  among  the  "spoils,"  among  pic- 
tures and  books,  drawings  and  medals,  memories  and 
relics  and  anecdotes,  things  of  a  remote  but  charm- 
ing reference,  very  much  the  effect  of  a  sudden  rise 
into  a  finer  and  clearer  air  and  of  a  stopgap  against 
one's  own  coveted  renewal  of  the  more  direct  experi- 
ence. If  I  allude  to  a  particular,  to  a  personal  yearn- 
ing appreciation  of  those  matters,  it  is  with  the  justi- 
fied conviction — this  justification  having  been  all  along 
abundantly  perceptible — that  appreciation  of  the  gen- 
eral sort  only  waited  to  be  called  for,  though  to  be 
called  for  with  due  authority.  It  was  the  sign  of  our 
host,  on  the  attaching  spot,  and  almost  the  principal 
one,  that  he  spoke,  all  round  and  with  the  highest 
emphasis,  as  under  the  warrant  of  authority,  and  that 
at  a  time  when,  as  to  the  main  matter  of  his  claim  and 
his  discourse,  scarce  anyone  pretended  to  it,  he  car- 
ried himself  valiantly  under  that  banner.  The  main 
matter  of  his  discourse  offered  itself  just  simply  as 
the  matter  of  civilisation — the  particular  civilisation 
that  a  young  roaring  and  money-getting  democracy, 
inevitably  but  almost  exclusively  occupied  with  "busi- 
ness success,"  most  needed  to  have  brought  home  to 
it.  The  New  England  air  in  especial  was  no  natural 
conductor  of  any  appeal  to  an  esthetic  aim,  but  the 
interest  of  Professor  Norton's  general  work,  to  say 
nothing  of  the  interest  of  his  character  for  a  closer 
view,  is  exactly  that  the  whole  fruitful  enterprise  was 
to  prove  intimately  a  New  England  adventure;  illus- 
trating thus  at  the  same  time  and  once  more  the  in- 
nate capacity  of  New  England  for  leavening  the  great 
American  mass  on  the  finer  issues. 


4i6  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

To  have  grown  up  as  the  accomplished  man  at  large 
was  in  itself  at  that  time  to  have  felt,  and  even  in  some 
degree  to  have  suffered,  this  hand  of  differentiation; 
the  only  accomplished  men  of  the  exhibited  New  En- 
gland Society  had  been  the  ministers,  the  heads  of  the 
congregations — whom,  however,  one  docks  of  little  of 
their  credit  in  saying  that  their  accomplishments  and 
their  earnestness  had  been  almost  wholly  in  the  moral 
order.  The  advantage  of  that  connection  was  indeed 
what  Norton  was  fundamentally  to  have  enjoyed  in 
his  descent,  both  on  his  father's  and  his  mother's  side 
(pre-eminently  on  the  latter,  the  historic  stock  of  the 
Eliots)  from  a  long  line  of  those  stalwart  pastoral 
worthies  who  had  notably  formed  the  aristocracy  of 
Massachusetts.  It  was  largely,  no  doubt,  to  this  heri- 
tage of  character  and  conscience  that  he  owed  the 
strong  and  special  strain  of  confidence  with  which  he 
addressed  himself  to  the  business  of  perfect  candour 
toward  his  fellow-citizens — his  pupils  in  particular; 
they,  to  whom  this  candour  was  to  become  in  the  long 
run  the  rarest  and  raciest  and  most  endearing  of 
"treats,"  being  but  his  fellow-citizens  in  the  making. 
This  view  of  an  urgent  duty  would  have  been  a  com- 
paratively slight  thing,  moreover,  without  the  spe- 
cial preoccupations,  without  the  love  of  the  high  hu- 
manities and  curiosities  and  urbanities  in  themselves, 
without  the  conception  of  science  and  the  ingrained 
studious  cast  of  mind,  which  had  been  also  an  affair 
of  heredity  with  him  and  had  opened  his  eyes  betimes 
to  educative  values  and  standards  other  than  most  of 
those  he  saw  flourish  near  at  hand.  He  would  defer 
to  dilettantism  as  little  as  to  vulgarity,  and  if  he  ul- 
timately embraced  the  fine  ideal  of  taking  up  the 
work  that  lay  close  to  him  at  home,  and  of  irrigating 


CHARLES   ELIOT  NORTON  417 

the  immediate  arid  tracts  and  desert  spaces,  it  was 
not  from  ignorance  of  the  temptation  to  wander  and 
linger  where  the  streams  already  flowed  and  the  soil 
had  already  borne  an  abiding  fruit. 

He  had  come  to  Italy  and  to  England  early  in  life; 
he  had  repeated  his  visits  to  these  countries  with  in- 
finite relish  and  as  often  as  possible — though  never,  as 
a  good  New  Englander,  without  certain  firm  and, 
where  they  had  to  be,  invidious  discriminations;  he 
was  attached  to  them  by  a  hundred  intellectual  and 
social  ties;  but  he  had  been  from  the  first  incapable 
of  doubting  that  the  best  activity  and  the  liveliest 
interest  lay  where  it  always,  given  certain  conditions, 
lies  in  America — in  a  measure  of  response  to  intellec- 
tual and  esthethic  "missionary"  labour  more  trace- 
able and  appreciable,  more  distinguishably  attested 
and  registered,  more  directly  and  artlessly  grateful,  in 
a  word,  than  in  the  thicker  elemental  mixture  of  Eu- 
rope. On  the  whole  side  of  taste  and  association  his 
choice  was  thus  betimes  for  conscious  exile  and  for  a 
considerably,  though  doubtless  not  altogether  irreme- 
diably, deprived  state;  but  it  was  at  the  same  time 
for  a  freedom  of  exhortation  and  a  play  of  ironic  com- 
ment less  restricted,  after  all,  in  the  clear  American 
air,  than  on  ground  more  pretentiously  enclosed — less 
restricted,  that  is,  from  the  moment  personal  convic- 
tion might  be  absolute  and  indifference  to  every  form 
of  provincial  bewilderment  equally  patient  and  com- 
plete. The  incontestable  crdnerie  of  his  attitude — a 
thing  that  one  felt  to  be  a  high  form  of  sincerity- 
always  at  last  won  success;  the  respect  and  affection 
that  more  and  more  surrounded  him  and  that  finally 
made  his  situation  sole  of  its  kind  and  pre-eminently 


4i 8  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

happy,  attest  together  the  interesting  truth  that  un- 
qualified confidence  in  one's  errand,  the  serenest  ac- 
ceptance of  a  responsibility  and  the  exercise  of  a  crit- 
ical authority  never  too  apt  to  return  critically  upon 
itself,  only  require  for  beneficent  action  that  they  be 
attended  at  once  with  a  fund  of  illustration  and  a 
fund  of  good  humour. 

Professor  Norton's  pre-eminent  work  in  the  inter- 
pretation of  Dante — by  which  I  mean  his  translation, 
text  and  notes,  of  the  "Divine  Comedy"  and  the 
"New  Life,"  an  achievement  of  infinite  piety,  patience 
and  resource;  his  admirable  volume  on  Church-Build- 
ing in  the  Middle  Ages  (to  say  nothing  of  his  charm- 
ing earlier  one,  "Study  and  Travel  in  Italy,"  largely 
devoted  to  the  cathedral  of  Orvieto);  his  long  and  in- 
timate friendship  with  Ruskin,  commemorated  by  his 
publication,  as  joint-executor  to  Ruskin's  will,  of  the 
best  fruits  of  the  latter's  sustained  correspondence 
with  him;  his  numerous  English  friendships,  in  es- 
pecial— to  say  nothing  of  his  native — all  with  persons 
of  a  highly  representative  character:  these  things  give 
in  part  the  measure  of  his  finest  curiosities  and  of  his 
appetite,  in  all  directions,  for  the  best  sources  and  ex- 
amples and  the  best  company.  But  it  is  probable 
that  if  his  Harvard  lectures  are  in  form  for  publica- 
tion, and  if  his  general  correspondence,  and  above  all 
his  own  easily  handsomest  show  in  it,  comes  to  be 
published,  as  most  emphatically  it  should  be,  they 
will  testify  not  in  the  least  to  any  unredeemed  con- 
traction of  life,  but  to  the  largest  and  happiest  and 
most  rewarded  energy.  An  exhilarated  invocation  of 
close  responsibility,  an  absolute  ease  of  mind  about 
one's  point  of  view,  a  thorough  and  never-failing  in- 


CHARLES  ELIOT  NORTON  419 

tellectual  wholeness,  are  so  far  from  weakening  the 
appeal  to  young  allegiances  that,  once  they  succeed 
at  all,  they  succeed  the  better  for  going  all  their  length. 
So  it  was  that,  with  admirable  urbanity  of  form  and 
uncompromising  straightness  of  attack,  the  Professor 
of  the  History  of  the  Fine  Arts  at  Harvard  for  a  quar- 
ter of  a  century  let  himself  go;  thinking  no  trouble 
wasted  and  no  flutter  and  no  scandal  other  than  aus- 
picious if  only  he  might,  to  the  receptive  and  aspiring 
undergraduate  mind,  brand  the  ugly  and  the  vulgar 
and  the  inferior  wherever  he  found  them,  tracking 
them  through  plausible  disguises  and  into  trumpery 
strongholds;  if  only  he  might  convert  young  products 
of  the  unmitigated  American  order  into  material  for 
men  of  the  world  in  the  finer  sense  of  that  term;  if 
only  in  short  he  might  render  more  supple  their  view, 
liable  to  obfuscation  from  sights  and  sounds  about 
them,  of  the  true  meaning  of  a  liberal  education  and 
of  the  civilised  character  and  spirit  in  the  civilised 
State. 

What  it  came  to  thus  was  that  he  availed  himself 
to  the  utmost  of  his  free  hand  for  sowing  and  plant- 
ing ideals — ideals  that,  though  they  might  after  all  be 
vague  and  general  things,  lacking  sometimes  a  little 
the  clearer  connections  with  practice,  were  yet  a  new 
and  inspiring  note  to  most  of  his  hearers,  who  could 
be  trusted,  just  so  far  as  they  were  intelligent  and 
loyal,  not  to  be  heavily  embarrassed  by  them,  not  to 
want  for  fields  of  application.  It  was  given  him, 
quite  unprecedentedly,  to  be  popular,  to  be  alto- 
gether loved  and  cherished,  even  while  "rubbing  it 
into"  whomever  it  might  concern  that  such  unfortu- 
nates were  mainly  given  over  to  mediocrity  and  vul- 


420  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

garity,  and  that  half  the  crude  and  ugly  objects  and 
aspects,  half  the  low  standards  and  loose  ends  sur- 
rounding them  and  which  they  might  take  for  granted 
with  a  facility  and  a  complacency  alike  deplorable, 
represented  a  platitude  of  imagination  that  dishon- 
oured the  citizen  on  whom  a  University  worthy  of 
the  name  should  have  left  its  stamp.  Happy,  it  would 
thus  in  fact  seem,  beyond  any  other  occasion  for  edu- 
cative influence,  the  immense  and  delightful  oppor- 
tunity he  enjoyed,  the  clear  field  and  long  reach  at- 
tached to  preaching  an  esthetic  crusade,  to  pleading 
for  the  higher  amenities  in  general,  in  a  new  and 
superficially  tutored,  yet  also  but  superficially  preju- 
diced, country,  where  a  consequently  felt  and  noted 
rise  of  the  tide  of  manners  may  be  held  to  have  come 
home  to  him,  or  certainly  to  have  visited  his  dreams. 
His  effect  on  the  community  at  large,  with  allowances 
of  time,  was  ever  indubitable — even  though  such 
workers  have  everywhere  to  take  much  on  trust  and 
to  remember  that  bushels  of  doctrine,  and  even  tons 
of  example,  make  at  the  most  ounces  and  grains  of 
responsive  life.  It  can  only  be  the  very  general  and 
hopeful  view  that  sustains  and  rewards — with  here 
and  there,  at  wide  intervals,  the  prized  individual  in- 
stance of  the  sown  seed  actively  emerging  and  flowering. 

If  not  all  ingenious  disciples  could  give  independent 
proof,  however,  all  could  rally  and  feel  the  spirit;  all 
could  crowd  to  a  course  of  instruction  which,  largely 
elective  and  optional,  yet  united  more  listeners  than 
many  others  put  together,  and  in  which  the  subject 
itself,  the  illustration  of  European  artistic  endeavour 
at  large,  or  in  other  words  the  record  of  man's  most 
comprehensive  sacrifice  to  organised  beauty,  tended  so 
to  take  up  on  familiar  ground  the  question  of  man-* 


CHARLES  ELIOT  NORTON  421 

ners,  character,  conscience,  tone,  to  bristle  with  ques- 
tions addressed  to  the  actual  and  possible  American 
scene.  That,  I  hasten  to  add,  was  of  course  but  one 
side  of  the  matter;  there  were  wells  of  special  science 
for  those  who  chose  to  draw  from  them,  and  an  inner 
circle  of  pupils  whose  whole  fruitful  relation  to  their 
philosopher  and  friend — the  happy  and  easy  privilege 
of  Shady  Hill  in  general,  where  other  charming  per- 
sonal influences  helped,  not  counting  as  least  in  this 
—can  scarce  have  failed  to  prepare  much  practical 
evidence  for  observation  still  to  come.  The  ivory 
tower  of  study  would  ever,  by  his  natural  bent,  I 
think,  have  most  solicited  Charles  Norton;  but  he 
liked,  as  I  say,  he  accepted  without  a  reserve,  the 
function  of  presiding  over  young  destinies;  he  believed 
in  the  personal  and  the  social  communication  of  light, 
and  had  a  gift  for  the  generous  and  personal  relation 
that  perhaps  found  its  best  issue,  as  I  have  already 
hinted,  in  his  admirable  letters.  These  were  not  of 
this  hustled  and  hustling  age,  but  of  a  cooler  and 
steadier  sphere  and  rhythm,  and  of  a  charming  man- 
nerly substantial  type  to  which  he  will  have  been,  I 
think,  among  correspondents  truly  animated  by  the 
social  spirit  and  a  due  cosmopolite  ideal,  one  of  the 
last  systematically  to  sacrifice.  With  the  lapse  of 
years  I  ceased  to  be,  I  admit,  a  near  spectator  of  his 
situation;  but  my  sense  of  his  activity — with  more 
intimate  renewals,  besides,  occasionally  taking  place — 
was  to  be,  all  along,  so  constantly  fed  by  echo  and 
anecdote  and  all  manner  of  indirect  glimpses,  that  I 
find  myself  speak  quite  with  the  confidence  and  with 
all  the  attachment  of  a  continuous  "assistant." 

With  which,  if  I  reflect  on  this,  I  see  how  interest- 
ing a  case  above  all  my  distinguished  friend  was  ever 


422  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  remain  to  me — a  case,  I  mean,  of  such  a  mixture 
of  the  elements  as  would  have  seemed  in  advance, 
critically  speaking,  quite  anomalous  or  at  least  highly 
incalculable.  His  interest  was  predominantly  in  Art, 
as  the  most  beneficial  of  human  products;  his  osten- 
sible plea  was  for  the  esthetic  law,  under  the  wide 
wing  of  which  we  really  move,  it  may  seem  to  many  of 
us,  in  an  air  of  strange  and  treacherous  appearances, 
of  much  bewilderment  and  not  a  little  mystification; 
of  terribly  fine  and  complicated  issues  in  short,  such 
as  call  for  the  highest  interpretative  wisdom.  But  if 
nothing  was  of  a  more  delightful  example  than  Pro- 
fessor Norton's  large  and  nourished  serenity  in  all 
these  connections,  a  serenity  seasoned  and  tempered, 
as  it  were,  by  infinite  interest  in  his  "subject,"  by  a 
steadying  faith  in  exact  and  extensive  knowledge,  so 
to  a  fond  and  incorrigible  student  of  character  the 
case,  as  I  have  called  it,  and  the  long  and  genial  ca- 
reer, may  seem  to  shine  in  the  light  of  quite  other 
importances,  quite  other  references,  than  the  presumed 
and  the  nominal.  Nothing  in  fact  can  be  more  inter- 
esting to  a  haunter  of  other  intellectual  climes  and  a 
worshipper  at  the  esthetic  shrine  quand  meme  than  to 
note  once  more  how  race  and  implanted  quality  and 
association  always  in  the  end  come  by  their  own;  how 
for  example  a  son  of  the  Puritans  the  most  intellec- 
tually transmuted,  the  most  liberally  emancipated  and 
initiated  possible,  could  still  plead  most  for  substance 
when  proposing  to  plead  for  style,  could  still  try  to 
lose  himself  in  the  labyrinth  of  delight  while  keeping 
tight  hold  of  the  clue  of  duty,  tangled  even  a  little  in 
his  feet;  could  still  address  himself  all  consistently  to 
the  moral  conscience  while  speaking  as  by  his  office 
for  our  imagination  and  our  free  curiosity.  All  of 


CHARLES  ELIOT  NORTON  423 

which  vision  of  him,  however,  is  far  from  pointing  to 
a  wasted  effort.  The  great  thing,  whatever  turn  we 
take,  is  to  find  before  us  perspectives  and  to  have  a 
weight  to  throw;  in  accordance  with  which  wisdom 
the  world  he  lived  in  received  for  long  no  firmer  nor 
more  gallant  and  generous  impress  than  that  of  Charles 
Eliot  Norton. 


LONDON  NOTES 

January  1897 

I  AM  afraid  the  interest  of  the  world  of  native  letters 
is  not  at  this  moment  so  great  as  to  make  us  despise 
mere  translation  as  an  aid  to  curiosity.  There  is  in- 
deed no  reason  why  we  should  forbear  to  say  in  ad- 
vance what  we  are  certain,  every  time,  to  say  after 
(after  the  heat  has  cooled  I  mean:)  namely,  that 
nothing  is  easier  to  concede  than  that  Ibsen — conten- 
tious name ! — would  be  much  less  remarked  if  he  were 
one  of  a  dozen.  It  is  impossible,  in  London  at  least, 
to  shut  one's  eyes  to  the  fact  that  if  to  so  many  in- 
genious minds  he  is  a  kind  of  pictorial  monster,  a 
grotesque  on  the  sign  of  a  side-show,  this  is  at  least 
partly  because  his  form  has  a  monstrous  rarity.  It 
is  one  of  the  odd  things  of  our  actual  esthetics  that 
the  more  theatres  multiply  the  less  any  one  reads  a 
play — the  less  any  one  cares,  in  a  word,  for  the  text 
of  the  adventure.  That  no  one  ever  does  read  a  play 
has  long  been  a  commonplace  of  the  wisdom  of  book- 
sellers. Ibsen,  however,  is  a  text,  and  Ibsen  is  read, 
and  Ibsen  contradicts  the  custom  and  confounds  the 
prejudice;  with  the  effect  thereby,  in  an  odd  way,  of 
being  doubly  an  exotic.  His  yiolent  substance  im- 
poses, as  it  were,  his  insidious  form;  it  is  not  (as 
would  have  seemed  more  likely)  the  form  that  imposes 
the  substance.  Mr.  William  Archer  has  just  published 
his  version  of  "John  Gabriel  Borkman,"  of  which, 
moreover,  French  and  German  versions  reach  us  at  the 

424 


LONDON  NOTES  425 

same  moment.  There  are  therefore  all  the  elements 
of  a  fresh  breeze  in  the  wind — one  has  already  a  sense 
as  of  a  cracking  of  whips  and  a  girding  of  loins.  You 
may  by  this  time  be  terribly  tired  of  it  all  in  America; 
but,  as  I  mentioned  a  fortnight  ago,  we  have  had 
very  recent  evidence  that  languor  here,  in  this  con- 
nection, is  by  no  means  as  yet  the  dominant  note. 
It  is  not  the  dispute  itself,  however,  that  most  inter- 
ests me:  let  me  pay  it,  for  what  it  has  been  and  what 
it  still  may  be,  the  mere  superficial  tribute  of  saying 
that  it  constitutes  one  of  the  very  few  cases  of  con- 
tagious discussion  of  a  matter  not  political,  a  question 
not  of  mere  practice,  of  which  I  remember  to  have  felt, 
in  a  heavy  air,  the  engaging  titillation.  In  London 
generally,  I  think,  the  wandering  breath  of  criticism 
is  the  stray  guest  at  the  big  party — the  shy  young 
man  whom  nobody  knows.  In  this  remarkable  in- 
stance the  shy  young  man  has  ventured  to  pause  and 
hover,  has  lighted  on  a  topic,  introduced  himself  and, 
after  a  gasp  of  consternation  in  the  company,  seen  a 
little  circle  gather  round  him.  I  can  only  speak  as 
one  of  the  little  circle,  testifying  to  my  individual 
glee. 

The  author  who  at  the  age  of  seventy,  a  provincial 
of  provincials,  turns  out  "John  Gabriel"  is  frankly 
for  me  so  much  one  of  the  peculiar  pleasures  of  the 
day,  one  of  the  current  strong  sensations,  that,  erect 
as  he  seems  still  to  stand,  I  deplore  his  extreme  ma- 
turity and,  thinking  of  what  shall  happen,  look  round 
in  vain  for  any  other  possible  source  of  the  same  kind 
of  emotion.  For  Ibsen  strikes  me  as  an  extraordinary 
curiosity,  and  every  time  he  sounds  his  note  the  mir- 
acle to  my  perception  is  renewed.  I  call  it  a  miracle 


426  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

because  it  is  a  result  of  so  dry  a  view  of  life,  so  indif- 
ferent a  vision  of  the  comedy  of  things.  His  idea  of 
the  thing  represented  is  never  the  comic  idea,  though 
this  is  evidently  what  it  often  only  can  be  for  many 
of  his  English  readers  and  spectators.  Comedy  more- 
over is  a  product  mainly  of  observation,  and  I  scarcely 
know  what  to  say  of  his  figures  except  that  they 
haven't  the  signs.  The  answer  to  that  is  doubtless 
partly  that  they  haven't  the  English,  but  have  the 
Norwegian.  In  such  a  case  one  of  the  Norwegian 
must  be  in  truth  this  very  lack  of  signs. 

They  have  no  tone  but  their  moral  tone.  They  are 
highly  animated  abstractions,  with  the  extraordinary, 
the  brilliant  property  of  becoming  when  represented  at 
once  more  abstract  and  more  living.  If  the  spirit  is 
a  lamp  within  us,  glowing  through  what  the  world 
and  the  flesh  make  of  us  as  through  a  ground-glass 
shade,  then  such  pictures  as  Little  Eyolf  and  John 
Gabriel  are  each  a  chassez-croisez  of  lamps  burning,  as 
in  tasteless  parlours,  with  the  flame  practically  ex- 
posed. There  are  no  shades  in  the  house,  or  the  Nor- 
wegian ground-glass  is  singularly  clear.  There  is  a 
positive  odour  of  spiritual  paraffin.  The  author  never- 
theless arrives  at  the  dramatist's  great  goal — he  arrives 
for  all  his  meagreness  at  intensity.  The  meagreness, 
which  is  after  all  but  an  unconscious,  an  admirable 
economy,  never  interferes  with  that:  it  plays  straight 
into  the  hands  of  his  rare  mastery  of  form.  The 
contrast  between  this  form — so  difficult  to  have  reached, 
so  "evolved,"  so  civilised — and  the  bareness  and 
bleakness  of  his  little  northern  democracy  is  the 
source  of  half  the  hard  frugal  charm  that  he  puts 
forth.  In  the  cold  fixed  light  of  it  the  notes  we  speak 


LONDON  NOTES  427 

of  as  deficiencies  take  a  sharp  value  in  the  picture. 
There  is  no  small-talk,  there  are  scarcely  any  man- 
ners. On  the  other  hand  there  is  so  little  vulgarity 
that  this  of  itself  has  almost  the  effect  of  a  deeper,  a 
more  lonely  provincialism.  The  background  at  any 
rate  is  the  sunset  over  the  ice.  Well  in  the  very  front 
of  the  scene  lunges  with  extraordinary  length  of  arm 
the  Ego  against  the  Ego,  and  rocks  in  a  rigour  of  pas- 
sion the  soul  against  the  soul — a  spectacle,  a  move- 
ment, as  definite  as  the  relief  of  silhouettes  in  black 
paper  or  of  a  train  of  Eskimo  dogs  on  the  snow.  Down 
from  that  desolation  the  sturdy  old  symbolist  comes 
this  time  with  a  supreme  example  of  his  method.  It 
is  a  high  wonder  and  pleasure  to  welcome  such  splen- 
did fruit  from  sap  that  might  by  now  have  shown 
something  of  the  chill  of  age.  Never  has  he  juggled 
more  gallantly  with  difficulty  and  danger  than  in  this 
really  prodigious  "John  Gabriel,"  in  which  a  great 
span  of  tragedy  is  taken  between  three  or  four  per- 
sons— a  trio  of  the  grim  and  grizzled — in  the  two  or 
three  hours  of  a  winter's  evening;  in  which  the  whole 
thing  throbs  with  an  actability  that  fairly  shakes  us 
as  we  read;  and  in  which,  as  the  very  flower  of  his 
artistic  triumph,  he  has  given  us  for  the  most  beau- 
tiful and  touching  of  his  heroines  a  sad  old  maid  of 
sixty.  Such  "parts,"  even  from  the  vulgarest  point 
of  view,  are  Borkman  and  Ella  Rentheim. 


LONDON  NOTES 

June  1897 

I  AM  afraid  there  are  at  this  moment  only  two  notes 
for  a  communication  from  London  to  strike.  One  is 
that  of  the  plunge  into  the  deep  and  turbid  waters  of 
the  Jubilee;  the  other  is  that  of  the  inevitable  retreat 
from  them — the  backward  scramble  up  the  bank  and 
scurry  over  its  crest  and  out  of  sight.  London  is  in  a 
sorry  state;  nevertheless  I  judge  that  the  number  of 
persons  about  to  arrive  undaunted  will  not  fall  sub- 
stantially short  of  the  number  of  horror-stricken  fugi- 
tives. Not  to  depart  is  practically  to  arrive;  for  there 
is  little  difference  in  the  two  kinds  of  violence,  the 
shock  you  await  or  the  shock  that  awaits  you.  Let 
me  hasten,  however,  to  declare  that — to  speak  for  the 
present  only  of  the  former  of  these — the  prospect  is 
full  of  suggestion,  the  affair  promises  a  rare  sort  of 
interest.  It  began  a  fortnight  since  to  be  clear — and 
the  certitude  grows  each  day — that  we  are  to  be 
treated  to  a  revelation  really  precious,  the  domestic 
or  familiar  vision,  as  it  were,  the  back-stairs  or  under- 
side view,  of  a  situation  that  will  rank  as  celebrated. 
Balzac's  image  of  Venvers  de  I'histoire  contemporaine 
is  in  fact  already  under  our  nose,  already  offered  us 
in  a  big  bouncing  unmistakable  case.  We  brush  with 
an  irreverent  hand  the  back  of  the  tapestry — we  crawl 
on  unabashed  knees  under  the  tent  of  the  circus.  The 
commemoration  of  the  completed  sixtieth  year  of  her 
Majesty's  reign  will  figure  to  the  end  of  time  in  the 

428 


LONDON  NOTES  429 

roll  of  English  wonders  and  can  scarcely  fail  to  hold 
its  own  as  an  occasion  unparalleled.  And  yet  we 
touch  it  as  we  come  and  go — we  feel  it  mainly  as  a 
great  incommodity.  It  has  already  so  intimate,  so 
ugly,  so  measurable  a  side  that  these  impressions  begin 
to  fall  into  their  place  with  a  kind  of  representative 
force,  to  figure  as  a  symbol  of  the  general  truth  that 
the  principal  pomps  and  circumstances  of  the  historic 
page  have  had  their  most  intense  existence  as  material 
and  social  arrangements,  disagreeable  or  amusing  ac- 
cidents, affecting  the  few  momentary  mortals  at  that 
time  in  the  neighbourhood.  The  gross  defacement  of 
London,  the  uproarious  traffic  in  seats,  the  miles  of 
unsightly  scaffolding  between  the  West  End  and  the 
City,  the  screaming  advertisements,  the  sordid  strug- 
gle, the  individual  questions — "Haven't  we  been 
cheated  by  the  plausible  wretch  ?"  or  "How  the  devil 
shall  we  get  to  our  seats  after  paying  such  a  lot,  hey  ?" 
—these  things  are  actually  the  historic  page.  If  we 
are  writing  that  page  every  hour  let  us  at  any  rate 
commend  ourselves  for  having  begun  betimes,  even 
though  this  early  diligence  be  attended  with  extraor- 
dinary effects.  The  great  day  was  a  week  ago  still  a 
month  off,  but  what  we  even  then  had  full  in  view, 
was,  for  the  coming  stretch  of  time,  a  London  reduced 
to  such  disfigurement  as  might  much  better  seem  to 
consort  with  some  great  national  penance  or  mourn- 
ing. The  show,  when  the  show  comes  off,  is  to  last 
but  a  couple  of  hours;  and  nothing  so  odd  surely  ever 
occurred  in  such  a  connection  as  so  huge  a  dispropor- 
tion between  the  discipline  and  the  joy.  If  this  be 
honour,  the  simple  may  well  say,  give  us,  merciful 
powers,  the  rigour  of  indifference !  From  Hyde  Park 
Corner  to  the  heart  of  the  City  and  over  the  water 


430  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

to  the  solid  south  the  long  line  of  thoroughfares  is 
masked  by  a  forest  of  timber  and  smothered  in  swag- 
gering posters  and  catchpenny  bids,  with  all  of  which 
and  with  the  vociferous  air  that  enfolds  them  we  are 
to  spend  these  next  weeks  in  such  comfort  as  we  may. 
The  splendour  will  have  of  course  to  be  great  to  wash 
down  the  vulgarity — and  infinitely  dazzling  no  doubt 
it  will  be;  yet  even  if  it  falls  short  I  shall  still  feel 
that,  let  the  quantity  of  shock,  as  I  have  ventured  to 
call  it,  be  what  it  must,  it  will  on  the  whole  be  exceeded 
by  what  I  have  ventured  to  call  the  quantity  of  sug- 
gestion. This,  to  be  frank,  has  even  now  rolled  up  at 
such  a  rate  that  to  deal  with  it  I  should  scarce  know 
where  to  take  it  first.  Let  me  not  therefore  pretend 
to  deal,  but  only  glance  and  pass. 

The  foremost,  the  immense  impression  is  of  course 
the  constant,  the  permanent,  the  ever-supreme — the 
impression  of  that  greatest  glory  of  our  race,  its  pas- 
sionate feeling  for  trade.  I  doubt  if  the  commercial 
instinct  be  not,  as  London  now  feels  it  throb  and 
glow,  quite  as  striking  as  any  conceivable  projection  of 
it  that  even  our  American  pressure  of  the  pump  might, 
at  the  highest,  produce.  That  is  the  real  tent  of  the 
circus — that  is  the  real  back  of  the  tapestry.  There 
have  long,  I  know,  been  persons  ready  to  prove  by 
book  that  the  explanation  of  the  "historical  event" 
has  always  been  somebody's  desire  to  make  money; 
never,  at  all  events,  from  the  near  view,  will  that  ex- 
planation have  covered  so  much  of  the  ground.  No 
result  of  the  fact  that  the  Queen  has  reigned  sixty 
years — no  sort  of  sentimental  or  other  association  with 
it — begins  to  have  the  air  of  coming  home  to  the 
London  conscience  like  this  happy  consequence  of  the 


LONDON  NOTES  431 

chance  in  it  to  sell  something  dear.  As  yet  that  chance 
is  the  one  sound  that  fills  the  air,  and  will  probably 
be  the  only  note  audibly  struck  till  the  plaudits  of  the 
day  itself  begin  to  substitute,  none  too  soon,  a  more 
mellifluous  one.  When  the  people  are  all  at  the  win- 
dows and  in  the  trees  and  on  the  water-spouts,  house- 
tops, scaffolds  and  other  ledges  and  coigns  of  vantage 
set  as  traps  for  them  by  the  motive  power,  then  doubt- 
less there  will  be  another  aspect  to  reckon  with — then 
we  shall  see,  of  the  grand  occasion,  nothing  but  what 
is  decently  and  presentably  historic.  All  I  mean  is 
that,  pending  the  apotheosis,  London  has  found  in 
this  particular  chapter  of  the  career  of  its  aged  sov- 
ereign only  an  enormous  selfish  advertisement.  It 
came  to  me  the  other  day  in  a  quoted  epigram  that 
the  advertisement  shows  as  far  off  as  across  the  Chan- 
nel and  all  the  way  to  Paris,  where  one  of  the  reflec- 
tions it  has  suggested — as  it  must  inevitably  suggest 
many — appears  to  be  that,  in  contrast,  when,  a  year 
ago,  the  Russian  sovereigns  were  about  to  arrive  no 
good  Parisian  thought  for  a  moment  of  anything  but 
how  he  could  most  work  for  the  adornment  of  his 
town.  I  dare  say  that  in  fact  from  a  good  Parisian 
or  two  a  window  or  a  tree  was  to  be  hired;  but  the 
echo  is  at  least  interesting  as  an  echo,  not  less  than 
as  a  reminder  of  how  we  still  wait  here  for  the  out- 
break of  the  kind  of  enthusiasm  that  shall  take  the 
decorative  form.  The  graceful  tip  of  its  nose  has,  it 
must  be  admitted,  yet  to  show.  But  there  are  other 
sides  still,  and  one  of  them  immense — the  light  we 
may  take  as  flooding,  I  mean,  the  whole  question  of 
the  solidity  of  the  throne.  It  is  impossible  to  live 
long  in  England  without  feeling  that  the  monarchy 
is — below-ground,  so  to  speak,  in  particular — a  rock; 


432  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

but  it  was  reserved  for  these  days  to  accentuate  the 
immobility  of  even  that  portion  of  the  rock  which 
protrudes  above  the  surface.  It  is  being  tested  in  a 
manner  by  fire,  and  it  resists  with  a  vitality  nothing 
short  of  prophetic.  The  commercial  instinct,  as  I  say, 
perches  upon  it  with  a  security  and  a  success  that 
banish  a  rival  from  the  field.  It  is  the  biggest  of  all 
draws  for  the  biggest  of  all  circuses;  it  will  bring  more 
money  to  more  doors  than  anything  that  can  be  im- 
agined in  its  place.  It  will  march  through  the  ages 
unshaken.  The  coronation  of  a  new  sovereign  is  an 
event,  at  the  worst,  well  within  the  compass  of  the 
mind,  and  what  will  that  bring  with  it  so  much  as  a 
fresh  lively  market  and  miles  of  new  posters  and  new 
carpentry  ?  Then,  who  knows  ? — coronations  will,  for 
a  stretch  and  a  change  perhaps,  be  more  frequent  than 
anniversaries;  and  the  bargains  struck  over  the  last 
will,  again  at  the  worst,  carry  an  hilarious  country 
well  on  to  the  next.  Has  not  the  monarchy  moreover 
— besides  thus  periodically  making  trade  roar — the 
lively  merit,  for  such  an  observer  as  I  fancy  consider- 
ing these  things,  of  helping  more  than  anything  else  the 
answers  to  the  questions  into  which  our  actual  curios- 
ity most  overflows;  the  question  for  instance  of  whether 
in  the  case  before  us  the  triumph  of  vulgarity  be  not 
precisely  the  flushed  but  muscular  triumph  of  the  in- 
evitable ?  If  vulgarity  thrones  now  on  the  house-tops, 
"blown"  and  red  in  the  face,  is  it  not  because  it  has 
been  pushed  aloft  by  deep  forces  and  is  really  after 
all  itself  the  show  ?  The  picturesque  at  any  rate  has 
to  meet  the  conditions.  We  miss,  we  regret  the  old 
"style"  of  history;  but  the  style  would,  I  think,  be 
there  if  we  let  it:  the  age  has  a  manner  of  its  own  that 
disconcerts,  that  swamps  it.  The  age  is  the  loudest 


LONDON  NOTES  433 

thing  of  all.  What  has  altered  is  simply  the  condi- 
tions. Poor  history  has  to  meet  them,  these  condi- 
tions; she  must  accommodate  herself.  She  must  ac- 
cept vulgarity  or  perish.  Some  day  doubtless  she  will 
perish,  but  for  a  little  while  longer  she  remembers  and 
struggles.  She  becomes  indeed,  as  we  look  up  Pic- 
cadilly in  the  light  of  this  image,  perhaps  rather  more 
dramatic  than  ever — at  any  rate  more  pathetic,  more 
noble  in  her  choked  humiliation.  Then  even  as  we 
pity  her  we  try  perhaps  to  bring  her  round,  to  make 
her  understand  a  little  better.  We  try  to  explain  that 
if  we  are  dreadful  to  deal  with  it  is  only,  really,  a  good 
deal  because  we  so  detestably  grow  and  grow.  There 
is  so  horribly  much  of  us — that's  where  our  style  breaks 
down.  Small  crowds  and  paltry  bargains  didn't  mat- 
ter, and  a  little  vulgarity — just  a  very  little — could  in 
other  times  manage  to  pass.  Our  shame,  alas,  is  our 
quantity. 

I  have  no  sooner,  none  the  less,  qualified  it  so  un- 
graciously than  I  ask  myself  what  after  all  we  should 
do  without  it.  If  we  have  opened  the  floodgates  we 
have  at  least  opened  them  wide,  and  it  is  our  very 
quantity  that  perhaps  in  the  last  resort  will  save  us. 
It  cuts  both  ways,  as  the  phrase  is — it  covers  all  the 
ground;  it  helps  the  escape  as  well  as  produces  the 
assault.  If  retreat  for  instance  at  the  present  junc- 
ture is,  as  I  began  by  hinting,  urgently  imposed,  it 
is  thanks  to  our  having  so  much  of  everything  that 
we  find  a  bridge  for  our  feet.  We  hope  to  get  off  in 
time,  but  meanwhile  even  on  the  spot  there  are  blessed 
alternatives  and  reliefs.  I  have  been  trying  a  num- 
ber very  hard,  but  I  have  expatiated  so  on  the  com- 
plaint that  I  have  left  little  room  for  the  remedy. 


434  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

London  reminds  one  of  nothing  so  often  as  of  the  help 
she  gives  one  to  forget  her.  One  of  the  forms  actu- 
ally taken  by  this  happy  habit  is  the  ingenious  little 
exhibition,  at  the  Grafton  Galleries,  of  so-called  Dra- 
matic and  Musical  Art.  The  name  is  rather  a  grand 
one  and  the  show  has  many  gaps;  but  it  profits,  as 
such  places  in  London  so  often  profit,  by  the  law  that 
makes  you  mostly  care  less  what  you  get  into  than 
what  you  get  out  of.  With  its  Hogarths  and  Zoffanys 
— none  too  many,  I  admit — its  other  last-century  por- 
traits and  relics,  its  numerous  ghosts  of  Garrick,  its 
old  play-bills  and  prints,  its  echoes  of  dead  plaudits 
and  its  very  thin  attendance,  it  happens  to  be  for  the 
moment  a  quiet  bower  in  the  bear-garden.  It  is  a 
"scratch"  company,  but  only — and  I  can  scarce  say 
why — in  the  portion  in  which  the  portraits  of  the  day 
prevail  is  the  impression  vulgar.  Even  there  indeed 
this  suspicion  receives  a  grand  lift  from  Mr.  Whistler's 
exquisite  image  of  Henry  Irving  as  the  Philip  of  Ten- 
nyson's "Queen  Mary."  To  pause  before  such  a  work 
is  in  fact  to  be  held  to  the  spot  by  just  the  highest 
operation  of  the  charm  one  has  sought  there — the 
charm  of  a  certain  degree  of  melancholy  meditation. 
Meditation  indeed  forgets  Garrick  and  Hogarth  and 
all  the  handsome  heads  of  the  Kembles  in  wonder  rein- 
tensified  at  the  attitude  of  a  stupid  generation  toward 
an  art  and  a  taste  so  rare.  Wonder  is  perhaps  after 
all  not  the  word  to  use,  for  how  should  a  stupid  gen- 
eration, liking  so  much  that  it  does  like  and  with  a 
faculty  trained  to  coarser  motions,  recognise  in  Mr. 
Whistler's  work  one  of  the  finest  of  all  distillations  of 
the  artistic  intelligence  ?  To  turn  from  his  picture  to 
the  rest  of  the  show — which,  of  course,  I  admit,  is  not 
a  collection  of  masterpieces — is  to  drop  from  the  world 


LONDON  NOTES  435 

of  distinction,  of  perception,  of  beauty  and  mystery 
and  perpetuity,  into — well,  a  very  ordinary  place. 
And  yet  the  effect  of  Whistler  at  his  best  is  exactly  to 
give  to  the  place  he  hangs  in — or  perhaps  I  should 
say  to  the  person  he  hangs  for — something  of  the 
sense,  of  the  illusion,  of  a  great  museum.  He  isolates 
himself  in  a  manner  all  his  own;  his  presence  is  in  it- 
self a  sort  of  implication  of  a  choice  corner.  Have  we 
in  this  a  faint  foresight  of  the  eventual  turn  of  the 
wheel — of  one  of  the  nooks  of  honour,  those  inner- 
most rooms  of  great  collections,  in  which  our  poster- 
ity shall  find  him  ?  Look  at  him  at  any  rate  on  any 
occasion,  but  above  all  at  his  best,  only  long  enough, 
and  hallucination  sets  in.  We  are  in  the  presence  of 
one  of  the  prizes  marked  with  two  stars  in  the  guide- 
book; the  polished  floor  is  beneath  us  and  the  rococo 
roof  above;  the  great  names  are  ranged  about,  and 
the  eye  is  aware  of  the  near  window,  in  its  deep  recess, 
that  overhangs  old  gardens  or  a  celebrated  square. 


LONDON  NOTES 

July  1897 

I  CONTINUED  last  month  to  seek  private  diversion, 
which  I  found  to  be  more  and  more  required  as  the 
machinery  of  public  began  to  work.  Never  was  a 
better  chance  apparently  for  the  great  anodyne  of  art. 
It  was  a  supreme  opportunity  to  test  the  spell  of  the 
magician,  for  one  felt  one  was  saved  if  a  fictive  world 
would  open.  I  knocked  in  this  way  at  a  dozen  doors, 
I  read  a  succession  of  novels;  with  the  effect  perhaps 
of  feeling  more  than  ever  before  my  individual  liabil- 
ity in  our  great  general  debt  to  the  novelists.  The 
great  thing  to  say  for  them  is  surely  that  at  any  given 
moment  they  offer  us  another  world,  another  conscious- 
ness, an  experience  that,  as  effective  as  the  dentist's 
ether,  muffles  the  ache  of  the  actual  and,  by  helping 
us  to  an  interval,  tides  us  over  and  makes  us  face, 
in  the  return  to  the  inevitable,  a  combination  that 
may  at  least  have  changed.  What  we  get  of  course, 
in  proportion  as  the  picture  lives,  is  simply  another 
actual — the  actual  of  other  people;  and  I  no  more 
than  any  one  else  pretend  to  say  why  that  should 
be  a  relief,  a  relief  as  great,  I  mean,  as  it  practically 
proves.  We  meet  in  this  question,  I  think,  the  eternal 
mystery — the  mystery  that  sends  us  back  simply  to 
the  queer  constitution  of  man  and  that  is  not  in  the 
least  lighted  by  the  plea  of  "romance,"  the  argument 
that  relief  depends  wholly  upon  the  quantity,  as  it 
were,  of  fable.  It  depends,  to  my  sense,  on  the  quan- 

436 


LONDON  NOTES  437 

tity  of  nothing  but  art — in  which  the  material,  fable 
or  fact  or  whatever  it  be,  falls  so  into  solution,  is  so 
reduced  and  transmuted,  that  I  absolutely  am  ac- 
quainted with  no  receipt  whatever  for  computing  its 
proportion  and  amount. 

The  only  amount  I  can  compute  is  the  force  of  the 
author,  for  that  is  directly  registered  in  my  attention, 
my  submission.  A  hundred  things  naturally  go  to 
make  it  up;  but  he  knows  so  much  better  than  I 
what  they  are  that  I  should  blush  to  give  him  a  glimpse 
of  my  inferior  account  of  them.  The  anodyne  is  not 
the  particular  picture,  it  is  our  own  act  of  surrender, 
and  therefore  most,  for  each  reader,  what  he  most 
surrenders  to.  This  latter  element  would  seem  in 
turn  to  vary  from  case  to  case,  weie  it  not  indeed 
that  there  are  readers  prepared,  I  believe,  to  limit  their 
surrender  in  advance.  With  some,  we  gather,  it  de- 
clines for  instance  to  operate  save  on  an  exhibition  of 
"high  life."  In  others  again  it  is  proof  against  any 
solicitation  but  that  of  low.  In  many  it  vibrates  only 
to  "adventure";  in  many  only  to  Charlotte  Bronte; 
in  various  groups,  according  to  affinity,  only  to  Jane 
Austen,  to  old  Dumas,  to  Miss  Corelli,  to  Dostoiev- 
sky or  whomever  it  may  be.  The  readers  easiest  to 
conceive,  however,  are  probably  those  for  whom,  in 
the  whole  impression,  the  note  of  sincerity  in  the  artist 
is  what  most  matters,  what  most  reaches  and  touches. 
That,  obviously,  is  the  relation  that  gives  the  widest 
range  to  the  anodyne. 

I  am  afraid  that,  profiting  by  my  license,  I  drag 
forward  Mr.  George  Gissing  from  an  antiquity  of  sev- 
eral weeks.  I  blow  the  dust  of  oblivion  from  M. 


438  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

Pierre  Loti  and  indeed  from  all  the  company — they 
have  been  published  for  days  and  days.  I  foresee, 
however,  that  I  must  neglect  the  company  for  the 
sake  of  the  two  members  I  have  named,  writers — I 
speak  for  myself — always  in  order,  though  not,  I  admit, 
on  quite  the  same  line.  Mr.  Gissing  would  have  been 
particularly  in  order  had  he  only  kept  for  the  present 
period  the  work  preceding  his  latest;  all  the  more 
that  "In  the  Year  of  Jubilee"  has  to  my  perception 
some  points  of  superiority  to  "The  Whirlpool."  For 
this  author  in  general,  at  any  rate,  I  profess,  and  have 
professed  ever  since  reading  "The  New  Grub  Street," 
a  persistent  taste — a  taste  that  triumphs  even  over 
the  fact  that  he  almost  as  persistently  disappoints  me. 
I  fail  as  yet  to  make  out  why  exactly  it  is  that  going 
so  far  he  so  sturdily  refuses  to  go  further.  The  whole 
business  of  distribution  and  composition  he  strikes  me 
as  having  cast  to  the  winds;  but  just  this  fact  of  a 
question  about  him  is  a  part  of  the  wonder — I  use 
the  word  in  the  sense  of  enjoyment — that  he  excites. 
It  is  not  every  day  in  the  year  that  we  meet  a  novel- 
ist about  whom  there  is  a  question.  The  circumstance 
alone  is  almost  sufficient  to  beguile  or  to  enthrall;  and 
I  seem  to  myself  to  have  said  almost  everything  in 
speaking  of  something  that  Mr.  Gissing  "goes  far" 
enough  to  do.  To  go  far  enough  to  do  anything  is, 
in  the  conditions  we  live  in,  a  lively  achievement. 

"The  Whirlpool,"  I  crudely  confess,  was  in  a  man- 
ner a  grief  to  me,  but  the  book  has  much  substance, 
and  there  is  no  light  privilege  in  an  emotion  so  sus- 
tained. This  emotion  perhaps  it  is  that  most  makes 
me,  to  the  end,  stick  to  Mr.  Gissing — makes  me  with 
an  almost  nervous  clutch  quite  cling  to  him.  I  shall 


LONDON  NOTES  439 

not  know  how  to  deal  with  him,  however,  if  I  with- 
hold the  last  outrage  of  calling  him  an  interesting  case. 
He  seems  to  me  above  all  a  case  of  saturation,  and  it 
is  mainly  his  saturation  that  makes  him  interesting — 
I  mean  especially  in  the  sense  of  making  him  singular. 
The  interest  would  be  greater  were  his  art  more  com- 
plete; but  we  must  take  what  we  can  get,  and  Mr. 
Gissing  has  a  way  of  his  own.  The  great  thing  is  that 
his  saturation  is  with  elements  that,  presented  to  us 
in  contemporary  English  fiction,  affect  us  as  a  prod- 
uct of  extraordinary  oddity  and  rarity:  he  reeks  with 
the  savour,  he  is  bowed  beneath  the  fruits,  of  contact 
with  the  lower,  with  the  lowest  middle-class,  and  that 
is  sufficient  to  make  him  an  authority — the  authority 
in  fact — on  a  region  vast  and  unexplored. 

The  English  novel  has  as  a  general  thing  kept  so 
desperately,  so  nervously  clear  of  it,  whisking  back 
compromised  skirts  and  bumping  frantically  against 
obstacles  to  retreat,  that  we  welcome  as  the  boldest 
of  adventurers  a  painter  who  has  faced  it  and  sur- 
vived. We  have  had  low  life  in  plenty,  for,  with  its 
sores  and  vices,  its  crimes  and  penalties,  misery  has 
colour  enough  to  open  the  door  to  any  quantity  of 
artistic  patronage.  We  have  shuddered  in  the  dens 
of  thieves  and  the  cells  of  murderers,  and  have  dropped 
the  inevitable  tear  over  tortured  childhood  and  puri- 
fied sin.  We  have  popped  in  at  the  damp  cottage  with 
my  lady  and  heard  the  quaint  rustic,  bless  his  simple 
heart,  commit  himself  for  our  amusement.  We  have 
fraternised  on  the  other  hand  with  the  peerage  and 
the  county  families,  staying  at  fine  old  houses  till 
exhausted  nature  has,  for  this  source  of  intoxication, 
not  a  wink  of  sociability  left.  It  has  grown,  the  source 


440  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

in  question,  as  stale  as  the  sweet  biscuit  with  pink  en- 
hancements in  that  familiar  jar  of  the  refreshment 
counter  from  which  even  the  attendant  young  lady  in 
black,  with  admirers  and  a  social  position,  hesitates 
to  extract  it.  We  have  recognised  the  humble,  the 
wretched,  even  the  wicked;  also  we  have  recognised 
the  "smart."  But  save  under  the  immense  pressure 
of  Dickens  we  have  never  done  anything  so  dreadful 
as  to  recognise  the  vulgar.  We  have  at  the  very  most 
recognised  it  as  the  extravagant,  the  grotesque.  The 
case  of  Dickens  was  absolutely  special;  he  dealt  in- 
tensely with  "lower  middle,"  with  "lowest"  middle, 
elements,  but  he  escaped  the  predicament  of  showing 
them  as  vulgar  by  showing  them  only  as  prodigiously 
droll.  When  his  people  are  not  funny  who  shall  dare 
to  say  what  they  are  ?  The  critic  may  draw  breath 
as  from  a  responsibility  averted  when  he  reflects  that 
they  almost  always  are  funny.  They  belong  to  a  walk 
of  life  that  we  may  be  ridiculous  but  never  at  all 
serious  about.  We  may  be  tragic,  but  that  is  often  but 
a  form  of  humour.  I  seem  to  hear  Mr.  Gissing  say: 
"Well,  dreariness  for  dreariness,  let  us  try  Brondes- 
bury  and  Pinner;  especially  as  in  the  first  place  I 
know  them  so  well;  as  in  the  second  they  are  the 
essence  of  England;  and  as  in  the  third  they  are,  ar- 
tistically speaking,  virgin  soil.  Behold  them  glitter 
in  the  morning  dew." 

So  he  is  serious — almost  imperturbably — about  them, 
and,  as  it  turns  out,  even  quite  manfully  and  admi- 
rably sad.  He  has  the  great  thing:  his  saturation 
(with  the  visible  and  audible  common)  can  project 
itself,  let  him  get  outside  of  it  and  walk  round  it.  I 
scarcely  think  he  stays,  as  it  were,  outside  quite  as 


LONDON  NOTES  441 

much  as  he  might;  and  on  the  question  of  form  he 
certainly  strikes  me  as  staying  far  too  little.  It  is 
form  above  all  that  is  talent,  and  if  Mr.  Gissing's 
were  proportionate  to  his  knowledge,  to  what  may  be 
called  his  possession,  we  should  have  a  larger  force  to 
reckon  with.  That — not  to  speak  of  the  lack  of  in- 
tensity in  his  imagination — is  the  direction  in  which 
one  would  wish  him  to  go  further.  Our  Anglo-Saxon 
tradition  of  these  matters  remains  surely  in  some  re- 
spects the  strangest.  After  the  perusal  of  such  a  book 
as  "The  Whirlpool"  I  feel  as  if  I  had  almost  to  ex- 
plain that  by  "these  matters"  I  mean  the  whole  ques- 
tion of  composition,  of  foreshortening,  of  the  propor- 
tion and  relation  of  parts.  Mr.  Gissing,  to  wind  up 
my  reserves,  overdoes  the  ostensible  report  of  spoken 
words;  though  I  hasten  to  add  that  this  abuse  is  so 
general  a  sign,  in  these  days,  of  the  English  and  the 
American  novel  as  to  deprive  a  challenge  of  every 
hope  of  credit.  It  is  attended  visibly — that  is  visibly 
to  those  who  can  see — with  two  or  three  woeful  results. 
If  it  had  none  other  it  would  still  deserve  arraignment 
on  the  simple  ground  of  what  it  crowds  out — the 
golden  blocks  themselves  of  the  structure,  the  whole 
divine  exercise  and  mystery  of  the  exquisite  art  of 
presentation. 

The  ugliest  trick  it  plays  at  any  rate  is  its  effect 
on  that  side  of  the  novelist's  effort — the  side  of  most 
difficulty  and  thereby  of  most  dignity — which  con- 
sists in  giving  the  sense  of  duration,  of  the  lapse  and 
accumulation  of  time.  This  is  altogether  to  my  view 
the  stiffest  problem  that  the  artist  in  fiction  has  to 
tackle,  and  nothing  is  more  striking  at  present  than 
the  blankness,  for  the  most  part,  of  his  indifference  to 


442  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

it.  The  mere  multiplication  of  quoted  remarks  is  the 
last  thing  to  strengthen  his  hand.  Such  an  expedi- 
ent works  exactly  to  the  opposite  end,  absolutely 
minimising,  in  regard  to  time,  our  impression  of  lapse 
and  passage.  That  is  so  much  the  case  that  I  can 
think  of  no  novel  in  which  it  prevails  as  giving  at  all 
the  sense  of  the  gradual  and  the  retarded — the  stretch 
of  the  years  in  which  developments  really  take  place. 
The  picture  is  nothing  unless  it  be  a  picture  of  the 
conditions,  and  the  conditions  are  usually  hereby  quite 
omitted.  Thanks  to  this  perversity  everything  dealt 
with  in  fiction  appears  at  present  to  occur  simply  on 
the  occasion  of  a  few  conversations  about  it;  there 
is  no  other  constitution  of  it.  A  few  hours,  a  few 
days  seem  to  account  for  it.  The  process,  the  "dark 
backward  and  abysm,"  is  really  so  little  reproduced. 
We  feel  tempted  to  send  many  an  author,  to  learn 
the  rudiments  of  this  secret,  back  to  his  Balzac  again, 
the  most  accomplished  master  of  it.  He  will  learn 
also  from  Balzac  while  he  is  about  it  that  nothing 
furthermore,  as  intrinsic  effect,  so  much  discounts  itself 
as  this  abuse  of  the  element  of  colloquy. 

"Dialogue,"  as  it  is  commonly  called,  is  singularly 
suicidal  from  the  moment  it  is  not  directly  illustrative 
of  something  given  us  by  another  method,  something 
constituted  and  presented.  It  is  impossible  to  read 
work  even  as  interesting  as  Mr.  Gissing's  without  rec- 
ognising the  impossibility  of  making  people  both  talk 
"all  the  time"  and  talk  with  the  needful  differences. 
The  thing,  so  far  as  we  have  got,  is  simply  too  hard. 
There  is  always  at  the  best  the  author's  voice  to  be 
kept  out.  It  can  be  kept  out  for  occasions,  it  can  not 
be  kept  out  always.  The  solution  therefore  is  to  leave 


LONDON  NOTES  443 

it  its  function,  for  it  has  the  supreme  one.  This  func- 
tion, properly  exercised,  averts  the  disaster  of  the 
blight  of  the  colloquy  really  in  place — illustrative  and 
indispensable.  Nothing  is  more  inevitable  than  such 
a  blight  when  antecedently  the  general  effect  of  the 
process  has  been  undermined.  We  then  want  the  re- 
port of  the  spoken  word — want  that  only.  But,  pro- 
portionately, it  doesn't  come,  doesn't  count.  It  has 
been  fatally  cheapened.  There  is  no  effect,  no  relief. 

I  am  writing  a  treatise  when  I  meant  only  to  give 
a  glance;  and  it  may  be  asked  if  the  best  thing  I  find 
in  Mr.  Gissing  is  after  all  then  but  an  opportunity  to 
denounce.  The  answer  to  that  is  that  I  find  two  other 
things — or  should  find  them  rather  had  I  not  deprived 
myself  as  usual  of  proper  space.  One  of  these  is  the 
pretext  for  speaking,  by  absolute  rebound,  as  it  were, 
and  in  the  interest  of  vivid  contrast,  of  Pierre  Loti; 
the  other  is  a  better  occasion  still,  an  occasion  for  the 
liveliest  sympathy.  It  is  impossible  not  to  be  affected 
by  the  frankness  and  straightness  of  Mr.  Gissing's 
feeling  for  his  subject,  a  subject  almost  always  dis- 
tinctly remunerative  to  the  ironic  and  even  to  the 
dramatic  mind.  He  has  the  strongest  deepest  sense 
of  common  humanity,  of  the  general  struggle  and  the 
general  grey  grim  comedy.  He  loves  the  real,  he  ren- 
ders it,  and  though  he  has  a  tendency  to  drift  too  much 
with  his  tide,  he  gives  us,  in  the  great  welter  of  the 
savourless,  an  individual  manly  strain.  If  he  only  had 
distinction  he  would  make  the  suburbs  "hum."  I 
don't  mean  of  course  by  his  circulation  there — the  ef- 
fect Ibsen  is  supposed  to  have  on  them;  I  mean  ob- 
jectively and  as  a  rounded  whole,  as  a  great  theme 
treated. 


444  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

I  am  ashamed  of  having  postponed  "Ramuntcho," 
for  "Ramuntcho"  is  a  direct  recall  of  the  beauty  of 
"Pecheur  d'Islande"  and  "Mon  Frere  Yves"— in 
other  words  a  literary  impression  of  the  most  exqui- 
site order.  Perhaps  indeed  it  is  as  well  that  a  critic 
should  postpone — and  quite  indefinitely — an  author  as 
to  whom  he  is  ready  to  confess  that  his  critical  in- 
stinct is  quite  suspended.  Oh  the  blessing  of  a  book, 
the  luxury  of  a  talent,  that  one  is  only  anxious  not  to 
reason  about,  only  anxious  to  turn  over  in  the  mind 
and  to  taste !  It  is  a  poor  business  perhaps,  but  I 
have  nothing  more  responsible  to  say  of  Loti  than  that 
I  adore  him.  I  love  him  when  he  is  bad — and  heaven 
knows  he  has  occasionally  been  so — more  than  I  love 
other  writers  when  they  are  good.  If  therefore  he  is 
on  the  whole  quite  at  his  best  in  "Ramuntcho"  I  fear 
my  appreciation  is  an  undertaking  too  merely  active 
for  indirect  expression.  I  can  give  it  no  more  coher- 
ent form  than  to  say  that  he  makes  the  act  of  partak- 
ing one  of  the  joys  that,  as  things  mainly  go,  a  reader 
must  be  pretty  well  provided  to  be  able  not  to  jump 
at.  And  yet  there  are  readers,  apparently,  who  are 
so  provided.  There  are  readers  who  don't  jump  and 
are  cocksure  they  can  do  without  it.  My  sense  of  the 
situation  is  that  they  are  wrong — that  with  famine 
stalking  so  abroad  literally  no  one  can.  I  defy  it  not 
to  tell  somewhere — become  a  gap  one  can  immediately 
"spot." 

It  is  well  to  content  one's  self,  at  all  events,  with 
affection;  so  stiff  a  job,  in  such  a  case,  is  understand- 
ing or,  still  more,  explanation.  There  is  a  kind  of 
finality  in  Loti's  simplicity — if  it  even  be  simplicity. 
He  performs  in  an  air  in  which,  on  the  part  of  the 


LONDON  NOTES  445 

spectator,  analysis  withers  and  only  submission  lives. 
Has  it  anything  to  do  with  literature  ?  Has  it  any- 
thing to  do  with  nature  ?  It  must  be,  we  should  sup- 
pose, the  last  refinement  either  of  one  or  of  the  other. 
Is  it  all  emotion,  is  it  all  calculation,  is  it  all  truth,  is 
it  all  humbug  ?  All  we  can  say  as  readers  is  that  it 
is  for  ourselves  all  experience,  and  of  the  most  per- 
sonal intensity.  The  great  question  is  whether  it  be 
emotion  "neat"  or  emotion  rendered  and  reduced.  If 
it  be  resolved  into  art  why  hasn't  it  more  of  the  chill  ? 
If  it  be  sensibility  pure  why  isn't  it  cruder  and  clum- 
sier ?  What  is  exquisite  is  the  contact  of  sensibility 
made  somehow  so  convenient — with  only  the  beauty 
preserved.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  of  Loti  that 
his  sensibility  begins  where  that  of  most  of  those  who 
use  the  article  ends.  If  moreover  in  effect  he  repre- 
sents the  triumph  of  instinct,  when  was  instinct  ever 
so  sustained  and  so  unerring  ?  It  keeps  him  unfail- 
ingly, in  the  matter  of  "dialogue,"  out  of  the  over- 
flow and  the  waste.  It  is  a  joy  to  see  how  his  loose- 
ness is  pervaded  after  all  by  proportion. 


LONDON  NOTES 

August  1897 

I  SHRINK  at  this  day  from  any  air  of  relapsing  into 
reference  to  those  Victorian  saturnalia  of  which  the 
force  may  now  be  taken  as  pretty  well  spent;  and  if 
I  remount  the  stream  for  an  instant  it  is  but  with  the 
innocent  intention  of  plucking  the  one  little  flower  of 
literature  that,  while  the  current  roared,  happened — 
so  far  at  least  as  I  could  observe — to  sprout  by  the 
bank.  If  it  was  sole  of  its  kind  moreover  it  was,  I 
hasten  to  add,  a  mere  accident  of  the  Jubilee  and  as 
little  a  prominent  as  a  preconcerted  feature.  What  it 
comes  to  therefore  is  that  if  I  gathered  at  the  supreme 
moment  a  literary  impression,  the  literary  impression 
had  yet  nothing  to  do  with  the  affair;  nothing,  that 
is,  beyond  the  casual  connection  given  by  a  some- 
what acrid  aftertaste,  the  vision  of  the  London  of  the 
morrow  as  I  met  this  experience  in  a  woeful  squeeze 
through  town  ^the  day  after  the  fair.  It  was  the  sin- 
gular fate  of  M.  Paul  Bourget,  invited  to  lecture  at 
Oxford  under  university  patronage  and  with  Gustave 
Flaubert  for  his  subject,  to  have  found  his  appear- 
ance arranged  for  June  23.  I  express  this  untoward- 
ness  but  feebly,  I  know,  for  those  at  a  distance  from 
the  edge  of  the  whirlpool,  the  vast  concentric  eddies 
that  sucked  down  all  other  life. 

I  found,  on  the  morrow  in  question — the  great  day 
had  been  the  22nd — the  main  suggestion  of  a  journey 

446 


LONDON  NOTES  447 

from  the  south  of  England  up  to  Waterloo  and  across 
from  Waterloo  to  Paddington  to  be  that  of  one  of 
those  deep  gasps  or  wild  staggers,  losses  of  wind  and 
of  balance,  that  follow  some  tremendous  effort  or  some 
violent  concussion.  The  weather  was  splendid  and 
torrid  and  London  a  huge  dusty  cabless  confusion  of 
timber  already  tottering,  of  decorations  already  stale, 
of  badauds  already  bored.  The  banquet-hall  was  by 
no  means  deserted,  but  it  was  choked  with  mere  echoes 
and  candle-ends;  one  had  heard  often  enough  of  a 
"great  national  awakening,"  and  this  was  the  great- 
est it  would  have  been  possible  to  imagine.  Millions 
of  eyes,  opening  to  dust  and  glare  from  the  scenery 
of  dreams,  seemed  slowly  to  stare  and  to  try  to  recol- 
lect. Certainly  at  that  distance  the  omens  were  poor 
for  such  concentration  as  a  French  critic  might  have 
been  moved  to  count  upon,  and  even  on  reaching  Ox- 
ford I  was  met  by  the  sense  that  the  spirit  of  that 
seat  of  learning,  though  accustomed  to  intellectual 
strain,  had  before  the  afternoon  but  little  of  a  margin 
for  pulling  itself  together.  Let  me  say  at  once  that 
it  made  the  most  of  the  scant  interval  and  that  when 
five  o'clock  came  the  bare  scholastic  room  at  the  Tay- 
lorian  offered  M.  Bourget's  reputation  and  topic,  in 
the  hot  dead  Oxford  air,  an  attention  as  deep  and  as 
many-headed  as  the  combination  could  ever  have 
hoped  to  command. 

For  one  auditor  of  whom  I  can  speak,  at  all  events, 
the  occasion  had  an  intensity  of  interest  transcending 
even  that  of  Flaubert's  strange  personal  story — which 
was  part  of  M.  Bourget's  theme — and  of  the  new  and 
deep  meanings  that  the  lecturer  read  into  it.  Just  the 
fact  of  the  occasion  itself  struck  me  as  having  well- 


448  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

nigh  most  to  say,  and  at  any  rate  fed  most  the  all  but 
bottomless  sense  that  constitutes  to-day  my  chief  re- 
ceptacle of  impressions;  a  sense  which  at  the  same  time 
I  fear  I  cannot  better  describe  than  as  that  of  the 
way  we  are  markedly  going.  No  undue  eagerness  to 
determine  whether  this  be  well  or  ill  attaches  to  the 
particular  consciousness  I  speak  of,  and  I  can  only 
give  it  frankly  for  what,  on  the  whole,  it  most,  for 
beguilement,  for  amusement,  for  the  sweet  thrill  of 
perception,  represents  and  achieves — the  quickened 
notation  of  our  "modernity."  I  feel  that  I  can  pay 
this  last-named  lively  influence  no  greater  tribute  than 
by  candidly  accepting  as  an  aid  to  expression  its  con- 
venient name.  To  do  that  doubtless  is  to  accept  with 
the  name  a  host  of  other  things.  From  the  moment, 
at  any  rate,  the  quickening  I  speak  of  sets  in  it  is  won- 
derful how  many  of  these  other  things  play,  by  every 
circumstance,  into  the  picture. 

That  the  day  should  have  come  for  M.  Bourget  to 
lecture  at  Oxford,  and  should  have  come  by  the  same 
stroke  for  Gustave  Flaubert  to  be  lectured  about,  filled 
the  mind  to  a  degree,  and  left  it  in  an  agitation  of 
violence,  which  almost  excluded  the  question  of  what 
in  especial  one  of  these  spirits  was  to  give  and  the 
other  to  gain.  It  was  enough  of  an  emotion,  for  the 
occasion,  to  live  in  the  circumstance  that  the  author 
of  "Madame  Bovary"  could  receive  in  England  a 
public  baptism  of  such  peculiar  solemnity.  With  the 
vision  of  that,  one  could  bring  in  all  the  light  and 
colour  of  all  the  rest  of  the  picture  and  absolutely  see, 
for  the  instant,  something  momentous  in  the  very  act 
of  happening,  something  certainly  that  might  easily 
become  momentous  with  a  little  interpretation.  Such 


LONDON  NOTES  449 

are  the  happy  chances  of  the  critical  spirit,  always 
yearning  to  interpret,  but  not  always  in  presence  of 
the  right  mystery. 

There  was  a  degree  of  poetic  justice,  or  at  least  of 
poetic  generosity,  in  the  introduction  of  Flaubert  to  a 
scene,  to  conditions  of  credit  and  honour,  so  little  to 
have  been  by  himself  ever  apprehended  or  estimated: 
it  was  impossible  not  to  feel  that  no  setting  or  stage 
for  the  crowning  of  his  bust  could  less  have  appeared 
familiar  to  him,  and  that  he  wouldn't  have  failed  to 
wonder  into  what  strangely  alien  air  his  glory  had 
strayed.  So  it  is  that,  as  I  say,  the  whole  affair  was 
a  little  miracle  of  our  breathless  pace,  and  no  corner 
from  which  another  member  of  the  craft  could  watch 
it  was  so  quiet  as  to  attenuate  the  small  magnificence 
of  the  hour.  No  novelist,  in  a  word,  worth  his  salt 
could  fail  of  a  consciousness,  under  the  impression,  of 
his  becoming  rather  more  of  a  novelist  than  before. 
Was  it  not,  on  the  whole,  just  the  essence  of  the  mat- 
ter that  had  for  the  moment  there  its  official  recogni- 
tion ?  were  not  the  blest  mystery  and  art  ushered  for- 
ward in  a  more  expectant  and  consecrating  hush  than 
had  ever  yet  been  known  to  wait  upon  them  ? 

One  may  perhaps  take  these  things  too  hard  and 
read  into  them  foolish  fancies;  but  the  hush  in  ques- 
tion was  filled  to  my  imagination — quite  apart  from 
the  listening  faces,  of  which  there  would  be  special 
things  to  say  that  I  wouldn't  for  the  world  risk — with 
the  great  picture  of  all  the  old  grey  quads  and  old 
green  gardens,  of  all  the  so  totally  different  traditions 
and  processions  that  were  content  at  last,  if  only  for 
the  drowsy  end  of  a  summer  afternoon,  to  range  them- 


450  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

selves  round  and  play  at  hospitality.  What  it  ap- 
peared possible  to  make  out  was  a  certain  faint  con- 
vergence: that  was  the  idea  of  which,  during  the  whole 
process,  I  felt  the  agreeable  obsession.  From  the  mo- 
ment it  brushed  the  mind  certainly  the  impulse  was 
to  clutch  and  detain  it:  too  doleful  would  it  have 
been  to  entertain  for  an  instant  the  fear  that  M.  Bour- 
get's  lecture  could  leave  the  two  elements  of  his  case 
facing  each  other  only  at  the  same  distance  at  which 
it  had  found  them.  No,  no;  there  was  nothing  for  it 
but  to  assume  and  insist  that  with  each  tick  of  the 
clock  they  moved  a  little  nearer  together.  That  was 
the  process,  as  I  have  called  it,  and  none  the  less  in- 
teresting to  the  observer  that  it  may  not  have  been, 
and  may  not  yet  be,  rapid,  full,  complete,  quite  easy 
or  clear  or  successful.  It  was  the  seed  of  contact  that 
assuredly  was  sown;  it  was  the  friendly  beginning 
that  in  a  manner  was  made.  The  situation  was  han- 
dled and  modified — the  day  was  a  date.  I  shall  per- 
haps remain  obscure  unless  I  say  more  expressly  and 
literally  that  the  particular  thing  into  which,  for  the 
perfect  outsider,  the  occasion  most  worked  was  a  lively 
interest — so  far  as  an  outsider  could  feel  it — in  the 
whole  odd  phenomenon  and  spectacle  of  a  certain  usual 
positive  want  of  convergence,  want  of  communication 
between  what  the  seat  and  habit  of  the  classics,  the 
famous  frequentation  and  discipline,  do  for  their  vic- 
tims in  one  direction  and  what  they  do  not  do  for 
them  in  another.  Was  the  invitation  to  M.  Bourget 
not  a  dim  symptom  of  a  bridging  of  this  queerest  of 
all  chasms  ?  I  can  only  so  denominate — as  a  most 
anomalous  gap — the  class  of  possibilities  to  which  we 
owe  its  so  often  coming  over  us  in  England  that  the 
light  kindled  by  the  immense  academic  privilege  is  apt 


LONDON  NOTES  451 

suddenly  to  turn  to  thick  smoke  in  the  air  of  contem- 
porary letters. 

There  are  movements  of  the  classic  torch  round 
modern  objects — strange  drips  and  drops  and  won- 
drous waverings — that  have  the  effect  of  putting  it 
straight  out.  The  range  of  reference  that  I  allude  to 
and  that  is  most  the  fashion  draws  its  credit  from 
being  an  education  of  the  taste,  and  it  doubtless  makes 
on  the  prescribed  lines  and  in  the  close  company  of 
the  ancients  tremendous  tests  and  triumphs  for  that 
principle.  Nothing,  however,  is  so  singular  as  to  see 
what  again  and  again  becomes  of  it  in  the  presence  of 
examples  for  which  prescription  and  association  are 
of  no  avail.  I  am  speaking  here  of  course  not  of  un- 
expected reserves,  but  of  unexpected  raptures,  bewil- 
dering revelations  of  a  failure  of  the  sense  of  perspec- 
tive. This  leads  at  times  to  queer  conjunctions,  strange 
collocations  in  which  Euripides  gives  an  arm  to  Sarah 
Grand  and  Octave  Feuillet  harks  back  to  Virgil.  It 
is  the  breath  of  a  madness  in  which  one  gropes  for  a 
method — probes  in  vain  the  hiatus  and  sighs  for  the 
missing  link.  I  am  far  from  meaning  to  say  that  all 
this  will  find  itself  amended  by  the  discreet  dose  ad- 
ministered the  other  day  at  the  Taylorian  of  even  so 
great  an  antidote  as  Flaubert;  but  I  come  back  to  my 
theory  that  there  is  after  all  hope  for  a  world  still  so 
accessible  to  salutary  shocks.  That  was  apparent  in- 
deed some  years  ago.  Was  it  not  at  the  Taylorian 
that  Taine  and  Renan  successively  lectured  ?  Oxford, 
wherever  it  was,  heard  them  even  then  to  the  end. 
It  is  for  the  Taines,  Renans  and  Bourgets  very  much 
the  salting  of  the  tail  of  the  bird :  there  must  be  more 
than  one  try. 


452  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

It  is  possible  to  have  glanced  at  some  of  the  odd 
estimates  that  the  conversation  of  the  cultivated  throws 
to  the  surface  and  yet  to  say  quite  without  reserve 
that  the  world  of  books  has  suffered  no  small  shrink- 
age by  the  recent  death  of  Mrs.  Oliphant.  She  had 
long  lived  and  worked  in  it,  and  from  no  individual 
perhaps  had  the  great  contemporary  flood  received  a 
more  copious  tribute.  I  know  not  if  some  study  of 
her  remarkable  life,  and  still  more  of  her  remarkable 
character,  be  in  preparation,  but  she  was  a  figure  that 
would  on  many  sides  still  lend  itself  to  vivid  portrai- 
ture. Her  success  had  been  in  its  day  as  great  as  her 
activity,  yet  it  was  always  present  to  me  that  her 
singular  gift  was  less  recognised,  or  at  any  rate  less 
reflected,  less  reported  upon,  than  it  deserved:  unless 
indeed  she  may  have  been  one  of  those  difficult  cases 
for  criticism,  an  energy  of  which  the  spirit  and  the 
form,  straggling  apart,  never  join  hands  with  that  ef- 
fect of  union  which  in  literature  more  than  anywhere 
else  is  strength. 

Criticism,  among  us  all,  has  come  to  the  pass  of 
being  shy  of  difficult  cases,  and  no  one,  for  that  mat- 
ter, practised  it  more  in  the  hit-or-miss  fashion  and 
on  happy-go-lucky  lines  than  Mrs.  Oliphant  herself. 
She  practised  it,  as  she  practised  everything,  on  such 
an  inordinate  scale  that  her  biographer,  if  there  is  to 
be  one,  will  have  no  small  task  in  the  mere  drafting 
of  lists  of  her  contributions  to  magazines  and  journals 
in  general  and  to  "Blackwood"  in  particular.  She 
wrought  in  "Blackwood"  for  years,  anonymously  and 
profusely;  no  writer  of  the  day  found  a  porte-voix 
nearer  to  hand  or  used  it  with  an  easier  personal  lati- 
tude and  comfort.  I  should  almost  suppose  in  fact 
that  no  woman  had  ever,  for  half  a  century,  had  her 


LONDON  NOTES  453 

personal  "say"  so  publicly  and  irresponsibly.  Her  fa- 
cilities of  course  were  of  her  own  making,  but  the 
wonder  was  that  once  made  they  could  be  so  applied. 

The  explanation  of  her  extraordinary  fecundity  was 
a  rare  original  equipment,  an  imperturbability  of  cour- 
age, health  and  brain,  to  which  was  added  the  fortune 
or  the  merit  of  her  having  had  to  tune  her  instrument 
at  the  earliest  age.  That  instrument  was  essentially 
a  Scotch  one;  her  stream  flowed  long  and  full  without 
losing  its  primary  colour.  To  say  that  she  was  organ- 
ised highly  for  literature  would  be  to  make  too  light 
of  too  many  hazards  and  conditions;  but  few  writers 
of  our  time  have  been  so  organised  for  liberal,  for — 
one  may  almost  put  it — heroic  production.  One  of  the 
interesting  things  in  big  persons  is  that  they  leave  us 
plenty  of  questions,  if  only  about  themselves;  and 
precisely  one  of  those  that  Mrs.  Oliphant  suggests  is 
the  wonder  and  mystery  of  a  love  of  letters  that  could 
be  so  great  without  ever,  on  a  single  occasion  even, 
being  greater.  It  was  of  course  not  a  matter  of  mere 
love;  it  was  a  part  of  her  volume  and  abundance  that 
she  understood  life  itself  in  a  fine  freehanded  manner 
and,  I  imagine,  seldom  refused  to  risk  a  push  at  a  sub- 
ject, however  it  might  have  given  pause,  that  would 
help  to  turn  her  wide  wheel.  She  worked  largely  from 
obligation — to  meet  the  necessities  and  charges  and 
pleasures  and  sorrows  of  which  she  had  a  plentiful 
share.  She  showed  in  it  all  a  sort  of  sedentary  dash 
— an  acceptance  of  the  day's  task  and  an  abstention 
from  the  plaintive  note  from  which  I  confess  I  could 
never  withhold  my  admiration. 

Her  capacity  for  labour  was  infinite — for  labour  of 
the  only  sort  that,  with  the  fine  strain  of  old  Scotch 


454  NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 

pride  and  belated  letterless  toryism  that  was  in  her, 
she  regarded  as  respectable.  She  had  small  patience 
with  new-fangled  attitudes  or  with  a  finical  conscience. 
What  was  good  enough  for  Sir  Walter  was  good  enough 
for  her,  and  I  make  no  doubt  that  her  shrewd  unfil- 
tered  easy  flow,  fed  after  all  by  an  immensity  of  read- 
ing as  well  as  of  observation  and  humour,  would  have 
been  good  enough  for  Sir  Walter.  If  this  had  been 
the  case  with  her  abounding  history,  biography  and 
criticism,  it  would  have  been  still  more  the  case  with 
her  uncontrolled  flood  of  fiction.  She  was  really  a 
great  improvisatrice,  a  night-working  spinner  of  long, 
loose,  vivid  yarns,  numberless,  pauseless,  admirable, 
repeatedly,  for  their  full,  pleasant,  reckless  rustle  over 
depths  and  difficulties — admirable  indeed,  in  any  case 
of  Scotch  elements,  for  many  a  close  engagement  with 
these.  She  showed  in  no  literary  relation  more  acute- 
ness  than  in  the  relation — so  profitable  a  one  as  it  has 
always  been — to  the  inexhaustible  little  country  which 
has  given  so  much,  yet  has  ever  so  much  more  to  give, 
and  all  the  romance  and  reality  of  which  she  had  at 
the  end  of  her  pen.  Her  Scotch  folk  have  a  wealth  of 
life,  and  I  think  no  Scotch  talk  in  fiction  less  of  a 
strain  to  the  patience  of  the  profane.  It  may  be  less 
austerely  veracious  than  some — but  these  are  esoteric 
matters. 

Reading  since  her  death  "Kirsteen" — one  of  the 
hundred,  but  published  in  her  latest  period  and  much 
admired  by  some  judges — I  was,  though  beguiled,  not 
too  much  beguiled  to  be  struck  afresh  with  that  elu- 
sive fact  on  which  I  just  touched,  the  mixture  in  the 
whole  thing.  Such  a  product  as  "Kirsteen"  has  life — 
is  full  of  life,  but  the  critic  is  infinitely  baffled.  It 


LONDON  NOTES  455 

may  of  course  be  said  to  him  that  he  has  nothing  to 
do  with  compositions  of  this  order — with  such  wares 
altogether  as  Mrs.  Oliphant  dealt  in.  But  he  can  ac- 
cept that  retort  only  with  a  renunciation  of  some  of 
his  liveliest  anxieties.  Let  him  take  some  early  day 
for  getting  behind,  as  it  were,  the  complexion  of  a 
talent  that  could  care  to  handle  a  thing  to  the  tune 
of  so  many  pages  and  yet  not  care  more  to  "do"  it. 
There  is  a  fascination  in  the  mere  spectacle  of  so  se- 
rene an  instinct  for  the  middle  way,  so  visible  a  con- 
viction that  to  reflect  is  to  be  lost. 

Mrs.  Oliphant  was  never  lost,  but  she  too  often 
saved  herself  at  the  expense  of  her  subject.  I  have 
no  space  to  insist,  but  so  much  of  the  essence  of  the 
situation  in  "Kirsteen"  strikes  me  as  missed,  dropped 
out  without  a  thought,  that  the  wonder  is  all  the 
greater  of  the  fact  that  in  spite  of  it  the  book  does  in 
a  manner  scramble  over  its  course  and  throw  up  a 
fresh  strong  air.  This  was  certainly  the  most  that 
the  author  would  have  pretended,  and  from  her  scorn 
of  precautions  springs  a  gleam  of  impertinence  quite 
in  place  in  her  sharp  and  handsome  physiognomy, 
that  of  a  person  whose  eggs  are  not  all  in  one  basket, 
nor  all  her  imagination  in  service  at  once.  There  is 
scant  enough  question  of  "art"  in  the  matter,  but 
there  is  a  friendly  way  for  us  to  feel  about  so  much 
cleverness,  courage  and  humanity.  We  meet  the  case 
in  wishing  that  the  timid  talents  were  a  little  more 
like  her  and  the  bold  ones  a  little  less. 

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